The Power and the Money

Academics need to stop believing that talking to rich people tells them anything

Back in September 2016, Ian Bremmer made a very silly post in an attempt to be contrarian. It boiled down to: “The CEOs I talk to say that they are not worried about Trump, therefore he won’t do anything radical.” 

I called him out then for making a very dumb statement. My decision seems to have withheld the test of time. That said ... 

I am not calling Bremmer out because I believe that he needs to own up to every wrong statement. (I have made enough of them! See the mark-to-market tag on the sidebar.)

I am calling him out because the methodology that lead him to make the argument is pervasive and INCREDIBLY stupid. (Albeit less so in France, in my experience)

And what is that methodology? Talking to rich people and thinking that you are learning something because they are rich. Anyone who knows rich people is going to be VERY tempted to believe that the tidbits they dole out are filled with wisdom.

Nope.

So, stop, please. 

Reposted without comment from March 2016: How much could President Trump win from our s̶a̶t̶r̶a̶p̶i̶e̶s̶ allies?

 So, Donald Trump wants to turn America’s hegemony into a protection racket. Okay, then. How would those negotiations go?

First thing to do is estimate how much the U.S. could save by pulling out of Germany, Japan, and South Korea.

First take: billions and billions! The link goes to a 2009 study by the Commonwealth Institute. They get a cost of $127.1 billion for fiscal 2010: $132.1 billion in cost minus tribute host payments of $5 billion. (Page 9.) But that estimate is dumb. It simply pro-rates the defense budget by the number of personnel stationed overseas. Now, maybe some president might save all that money by simply downsizing the military. (Well, the Army would be “downsized” in that scenario; the Navy would be gutted.) 

Since Trump has made it clear that he has no intention of shrinking the military, then those personnel will simply be redeployed back to the United States. 

Second take: In 2013, the U.S. Senate took a look at basing costs. It estimated costs around $10 billion, 70% in Germany, Japan, and South Korea. (Page 1.) These costs do not include personnel costs or overhead: rather, they are the direct costs of keeping up the bases in those countries. German bases cost $4 billion. South Korean bases cost $1.9 billion. (Page 18.) Japanese bases cost $2.5 billion. (Page 40.)

But South Korea and Japan, unlike Germany, pay pretty large portions of the U.S. cost! (Hold that thought on Germany; this is based entirely on the Senate report.) In South Korea, U.S. taxpayers foot only $1.1 billion of the cost; South Koreans make up for $800 million. (Page 21.) Japan, meanwhile, covers more than 70% of U.S. costs, to the tune of $1.8 billion per year. Until 2010, in fact, Japan covered all U.S. basing costs. (Page 41.) So President Trump might wrap up the American empire-by-invitation in Asia for savings of ... $1.8 billion. Get out of Germany at the same time and you save $5.8 billion per year. 

Only you don’t! Consider the cost of transferring 7,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam: $19.3 billion. (Page 49.) Scale that up by the other 43,000 American forces in Japan and you get $119 billion to withdraw without demobilization. Add in the 29,000 forces in South Korea and you get $197 billion. Throw in the 36,000 troops planned to still be in Germany in 2017 and you get $296 billion. 

Now, that is a one-time cost, not an annual flow. And it is likely exaggerated, since most of the Naval and Air Force personnel overseas will not be as expensive to relocate as the Marines. So lets arbitrarily cut the cost by 60%. 30-year treasury bonds are currently yielding around 2.5%. Call it an annual expense of $5.8 billion between 2017 and 2047. 

$5.8 billion ≈ $5.8 billion. No savings. With interest rates at a near all-time low and shaving 60% off the topline estimate. Huh!

And now lets return to the German issue. Germany pays a share of American construction costs for our bases, but those costs are lumpy. In  2009, Rand estimated total German support to total $831 million. (Page 154.) If that number is accurate for other years, then the U.S. pays only $5.0 billion for our three main overseas presences. And $5.8 billion > $5.0 billion.

Third take: This big Rand report. It is long and complicated and does not cover the complete withdrawal option. But their minimum posture saves around $2.9 billion per year ... assuming that foreign contributions remained unchanged.

In other words, the American defense perimeter does not cost all that much. 

Now we need to figure out what these cost estimates imply for the negotiations.

President Trump, in this world, cannot simply threaten to walk away, because that would cost him. He needs to make one of two additional threats:

1. He is willing to incur costs to the United States if negotiations break down. That is, he tells his counterparts in Berlin, Tokyo and Seoul that he is willing to pay money to bug out unless our satraps allies fork over even more money. Good luck with that one.

2. He is willing to bug out and downsize the American military budget. Now those cuts do not have to be large for us to come out ahead — we are talking maybe 1% of the total defense budget — but they would need to be made. 

So, yeah, I suppose a cost-cutting President Trump could threaten to cut American military spending unless those foreigners pay us more. But unless he is willing to resort to an outright protection racket, he would net us 1% of the military budget on the threat of making a 1% cut in the military budget. 

Yeah, that makes sense. Totally worth it. After all, it isn’t like you could just, you know, cut the military budget without threatening our allies ... 

The power of propaganda

We may be in Mexico, but sometimes you get pulled back into discussing home.

Donald Trump just gave two very disturbing speeches. In one, he portrayed Long Island as an embattled paradise turned hellscape by violent Latino immigrants. In the other, he called for more police brutality. It is a continuation of a theme he started during the campaign.

What’s crazy is that Long Island is safer than it’s ever been. If you look at juvenile homicide arrests, you get basically nothing save for three in 2014, another one in 2016 and six this year. It is true that MS-13 recently carried out some horrific crimes in Suffolk. But that is not a crime wave.

So how does Trump get any traction? Sadly, I know the answer. I have family on Long Island and in South Florida.

These places are similar, heavily populated by the descendants of white Ellis Island immigrants, the generation of people who shaped America’s liberal version of itself. Jews, Italians, and Irish all turned into Americans by the melting pot. Yet current segregation, presidential propaganda, and the folk memory of the genuine crime explosion of the 1960s and 1970s, combines to make them all ready to believe things that just ain’t so.

Consider two anecdotes. I was in Broward County with my daughter at an outdoor zoo, where save for the bear and panthers the kiddos can walk around and interact with the animals. At one point, my daughter sprints out of the bathroom after we wash her hands. I’m not worried, not least because I’m there with family: her cousin, uncle and great-uncle are all outside. But this older white guy next to me, he says, “You ought to get one of those child leashes.” I say nah, why? 

“Crime. It’s crazy out there. Worse than ever.”

Me: no, not really, I grew up in New York in the 1970s and it was far more dangerous.

“I’m from New York too! Really, you think it’s safer now?”

Me: I know it. Look at how the city has changed, look at how Miami has changed. And then I show him some graphs (available at the Marshall Project). And he gets sort of quiet, as if he never expected a middle-aged white guy to take issue with what seemed to him to be an anodyne comment about an obvious truth.

Then the same conversation happens with my (very liberal) brother two days later.

With my brother, I showed him news stories from the 1980s when he lived in Miami that drove the point home. He was a little abashed: despite his own experience regularly travelling to neighborhoods that would have given him pause 20 years ago, despite his own daughter living in a formerly n0-go part of Plantation, and despite his knowledge of overall crime trends the incessant propaganda of the past two years had convinced him of something that just was not true.

Maybe the internet really has made the creation of alternate facts easier than in the past, but the alternative fact of “American carnage” has been created by just a presidential soapbox combined with the predilections of white people to believe the worst about their non-white neighbors. 

In short, as long as that predilection exists, demogogues will be able to make hay by making stuff up. The internet has affected American politics for the worse. But this is not one of the ways.

The fall in the Mexican peso was good until Trump came along

The Mexican peso began falling well before Donald Trump came on the scene. Opinion varies on Trump’s responsibility for the fall between April and November 2016 (Kevin Drum and Boz make good cases that he did not) but his administration is pretty clearly responsible for the gyrations after Election Day.

Let’s grant that the peso’s fall from 7.4¢ in November 2014 to 5.4¢ in November 2016 had nothing to do with the U.S. election. Was it a bad thing for Mexico?

Well, let’s start with inflation. Did the fall ignite inflation?

Wait, what? Let’s close in on that:

Inflation fell during most of the depreciation. It only started to rebound around the time of the U.S. election. I suppose it is possible that there is some model here where inflation is somehow stored up and then rebounds, but absent a big rise in inventories I do not see the mechanism.

Maybe the reason inflation fell was that the central bank tightened in the face of the depreciation? Let’s then look at interest rates:

The story is similar. Interest rates stay low through most of the depreciation. They only start rising in 2016. The central bank seems remarkably unworried by the fall until the latter half of 2016 ... which (perhaps coincidentally) is around the time that Donald Trump’s role in the depreciation becomes a point of contention. 

What about consumer confidence? Did the peso fall sap the animal spirits of Mexican consumers? Maybe the central bank did not need to raise interest rates because Mexican consumers refused to spend. 

Huh. Not a whole lot there until Trump’s election.

Finally, we’ll take a look at real wages, as a proxy for the labor market:

In short, 2015 was not a bad year at all, and 2016 was not much worse.

Some people have reported big price hikes in Mexico in 2016, but I am skeptical. Imaginary inflation has been seen all over the world — not least around the time of the adoption of the euro. And I have been travelling to Mexico pretty extensively over the period without noting big nominal hikes, save public transportation ... which is a pretty salient price and could easily cause people to feel that there is inflation going on when there is not. 

Either way, I submit to you: the depreciation of the Mexican peso has been a good thing for Mexico. It helped exports and cushioned the fall in oil prices to no discernible economic harm. 

No, actually Trump really did drive down the Mexican peso!

Kevin Drum announces with much certainty that Donald Trump has nothing to do with the peso’s fall! Is he right?

No. He’s not.

It is true that the Mexican peso weakened in November 2014, when oil prices dropped from around $80 to $66 and analysts concluded that prices were heading further down. It is also true that the peso kept weakening for much of the remainder of 2015, for reasons which are unlikely to have anything to do with Donald Trump, even if the above graph might have you think otherwise.

But after that? Let’s start by eyeballing it. First you have the weakness in January and February, when Trump polls well and then, on February 1st, starts winning. After that the markets breathe a sigh of relief as Trump starts to attract opposition … until the day Trump cleans up in Pennsylvania (and DE, RI, CT, and MD) and makes it clear that neither Cruz nor Kasich can stop him. After that, some stability … until Election Day, 2016.

Sure, you can draw a nice line through the trend and say, “Nope, Trump had nothing to do with it.” But that makes the ups-and-downs look might coincidental. 

But it gets worse for Drum’s argument. The peso moved on individual debate performances. It jumped right to the minute when the election result became clear. It tracked events with entirely understandable precision. And academics took notice: for fancy econometrics making the point, see here and here.

Finally, theory. For Drum to be right, he needs some sort of causal theory, something that would predict a long slow decline with the rest being random noise. (Highly coincidental noise, but still noise.) In other words, he needs a hypothesis. Oil prices won’t do it; they were priced in early. There might be another just-so story out there. I’d be curious to hear him propose it. But it seems silly to look for one, when there is an obvious explanation that fits the data staring us all in the face.

Trump immigration raids are for white voters in the Midwest

The Trump administration may or may not be seriously considering mobilizing the National Guard to deport illegal immigrants. (The link goes to the draft memo, not a secondary source.) The reason why the administration would need state governors to agree is that a federal mobilization of the ARNG to enforce domestic law would violate the Posse Comitatus Act. (Again, the link is to the actual text.)

But the Trump administration has begun making spectacular immigration raids. Those raids, however, are not picking up very many people: only 680 in the first week, according to this report. And the deportees are all criminals, whom the Obama administration was already deporting in massive numbers. 

So what is the point? Two possibilities.

1. This is just the start of a massively stepped-up program, including those National Guard mobilizations and lots of new federal spending.
2. This is intended to give Trump voters a sense that something dramatic is being done. The terror that it strikes among immigrants is collateral damage. (Or maybe collateral benefit, from Steve Bannon’s point of view.) 

Considering that this administration appears to be the opposite of a well-oiled machine in terms of management ability, but does seem to be taking the permanent campaign to a new level, I would bet on the latter. Like the infamous taco bowl tweet from the campaign, this is aimed squarely at angry white voters. 

North Carolina in historic and geographic perspective

Political events over the past few years in North Carolina have been quite depressing. Extreme gerrymandering diluted representation. In 2012, the Democrats won the popular vote for the federal House but lost most of the seats. In 2016, a 53% GOP margin for House votes won them 77% of seats; a 55% margin for state senate turned into 68% of the seats; in the state lower chamber, 53% of the vote got them 62% of the seats. (See here. For maps showing the power of gerrymandering in the state, see here.) 

Then, when the Republican governor lost re-election in 2016, the legislature moved to strip the Governorship of most of its power. 

But this is not unprecedented.

First, let us compare across space: Maryland is as gerrymandered as North Carolina, only in favor of Democrats. Is is true that Republicans benefit more nationally from gerrymandering (only Illinois and Maryland have a strong Democratic bias) but N.C. is not at all unique.

Second, the legislative power grab after the election is unique in the 21st century — the Maryland legislature did not try to strip Governor Hogan of his power in 2014 — but it is not unique across American history. First, consider Louisiana under Huey Long. For all the shenanigans, Governor McCrory did not move to destroy the opposition when he was in power the way Long did back in 1928-35. 

More ominously, consider Redemption in North Carolina. In the 1868 election, Republicans solidly trounced the Conservative Party. In 1870, however, the Conservatives managed to come back by effectively casting themselves as the white people’s party ... and using terror tactics by the Ku Klux Klan. Governor William Holden called out the militia to fight the KKK, but the Conservative nonetheless won the legislative elections. They first moved to prevent legislators from being seated from districts where the state militia arrested KKK terrorists. They then impeached Governor Holden. In 1876, the Conservative Party renamed itself the Democratic Party, becoming part of the national Democratic coalition. It took them until 1898 to fully disenfranchise the black population. (See also here.)

By those standards, North Carolina has so far been quite civilized. No riots, no extrajudicial killings or warrantless arrests, no declarations of martial law, and the courts have reined in the lame duck power grab and may reverse the gerrymander. Vigilance is warranted. Protest is warranted. And political mobilization is needed. But worse things have happened and worse has been overcome. 

Riots in Mexico

Mexico has been beset by widespread looting and demonstrations over the past five days. So far, there have been 987 arrests and two deaths. The incidents devolved into outright riots in Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo, and Monterrey, N.L.; but stores have been sacked and roads blockaded all over the country. I heard about the looting from friends living in Ecatepec, Mexico State, a poor suburb of Mexico City, but it has now made its way into American news.

The trigger? The Peña administration decided to raise gasoline prices on January 1st. Prices rose to heretofore unseen levels in real terms. The below figure show the retail price per gallon for Magna gasoline in Mexico and the equivalent blend in the United States, measured in real pesos of November 2016. 

Why the rise? It was essentially a tax hike. As you can see, Mexican retail gasoline prices have been above American ones since the middle of 2014. U.S. prices have risen recently, but Mexican prices remained lower.

The hike was not about raising Mexican prices to equal American prices. Rather, the Mexican government wanted to raise prices now in advance of its plan to fully liberalize prices later this year. The higher prices are in advance of liberalization, the more room the government has to impose a high excise tax. Since the current administration has promised to freeze said tax once it is introduced, it wants to be able to set the initial tax as high as possible.

As policy, none of this is a bad idea. Price liberalization will save the government money and excise taxes should be high. But as politics, it is terrible. A more popular government facing a better economic situation could have gotten away with raising gasoline prices. But the Peña administration is not popular and the economic situation is not good. 

The latest blow to the Peña administration has been the recent re-emergence of the man behind Trump’s visit to Mexico during the presidential campaign. Trump, as you can imagine, is not popular south of the border. Public opinion was horrified that the Peña administration invited him to meet the Mexican president. There was some hope that President Peña intended to lure candidate Trump into a trap, but instead Peña allowed Trump to roll all over him in a joint press conference. (The rules were no questions, but Trump invited them anyway; then Peña neither shut Trump down nor called out the GOP candidate when he contradicted what Peña said had gone down in the meeting.) 

The meeting was such a disaster that President Peña felt he had no choice but to fire Luis Videgaray, the man who had planned it.

But now Videgaray is back as the new foreign minister ... precisely because Peña believes that Videgaray can curry favor with President Trump. So this government brings the man who sold them out to Donald Trump and then turns around to raise gasoline prices? 

The economic situation makes the situation worse for the Administration. The “gasolinazo” happened while Mexican inflation is rising. (See the below chart.) Why is inflation rising? Well, the value of the peso is collapsing, driving up the price of imports. Why is the peso collapsing? Well, in one word, Donald Trump. The fear that he will impose trade barriers on Mexico causes investors to sell pesos, and so drives down the exchange rate.

But Donald Trump is a man whom many Mexicans believe would never have won election had President Peña had the cojones to humiliate him in that press conference way back when.  

But Donald Trump is a man whom many Mexicans believe would never have won election had President Peña had the cojones to humiliate him in that press conference way back when. 

Let us add it up. The Peña administration curries favor with candidate Trump. Trump wins the election, indirectly causing inflation to accelerate in Mexico. The Peña administration then pours fuel on the inflationary fire by hiking gasoline prices while bringing back the sellout who arranged the Trump meeting in order to curry more favor with the U.S. president-elect. 

Result: rioting.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador cannot believe his luck. 

(Filed under “2016 American election” because Donald Trump is not yet president and the roots of the crisis date back to his campaign.)

A flickering point of light in the Trump cabinet

There is not a lot to like in the Trump administration’s cabinet picks. But there is one who, jokes aside, might be a reasonably decent pick: Rick Perry.

I know, he wanted to abolish the agency he will run. And most of what Energy does involves nuclear weapons. But hear me out. Short version: Rick Perry has a surprisingly good energy record in Texas, and I speak as a deep green. If he embraces it and pushes it inside the Trump administration, then he will leave a great legacy. Sadly, that is not how I would bet, since the Governor has shied away from his biggest accomplishment.

Long version: Governor Perry has a surprisingly good record in Texas. The centerpiece of his accomplishments is a massive infrastructure plan called CREZ: the “Competitive Renewable Energy Zone.” In 2005, the legislature empowered the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) to create zones prioritzing the construction of long-distance power lines. The resulting infrastructure allowed the state to blow through all its targets for green energy. It hit its 2025 target in 2009. As of October 2016, wind had generated a bit over 12% of all utility-scale electric power in the state: not too far behind Germany at 17%. In fact, on November 27, windpower supplied 45% of total electricity demand. 

A Texan energy guy I speak to (wind or oil? You guess!) said that Perry was instrumental in finishing CREZ. Perry wasn’t the mastermind of the legislative push — with unanimity in the Senate and 91-14 in the House, and Troy Fraser pushing it in the Senate, that wasn’t the hard part. Rather, the SB 20 was a short act. (The link goes to the text; the legislative analysis is here and the whole legislative history is here.) It instructed PUCT to approve applications for CREZ power lines within 180 days, but that left a host of political and legal obstacles that would have killed the project in many other states. (I’m looking at you, Golden State.) 

What Perry did was, in the words of my acquaintance, “pull together folks from the various agencies, along with members of the House and Senate, and said, ‘All right, here’s a series of challenges that need to be addressed.’” In 2008, for example, it looked like the project was going to stall out, but Perry kept pushing. It got done, one of the most impressive infrastructure projects of the (pathetic) 21st-century United States. 

Could Secretary Perry take this national?

Yes! One of the great unheralded accomplishments of the second Bush administration (along with Medicare Part D) was the Energy Policy Act of 2005. First, it had a decent name rather than one of these stupid cutesy acronyms or idiot propaganda titles. Second, Section 216 empowered the Department of Energy (DOE) to “designate any geographic area experiencing electric energy transmission capacity constraints or congestion that adversely affects consumers as a national interest electric transmission corridor.” The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) could then authorize power lines, which would grant the operating utilities the right to exercise eminent domain. 

Now, none of this would be easy.

First, Perry would need to coordinate with Agriculture, Commerce and Interior.

Second, the courts have hamstrung the Act, holding that FERC cannot overturn a state refusal to permit a transmission line. (There is some pin-dancing, of course: that interpretation hinges on what Congress meant by the phrase  “withheld approval.” See page 96.) So Perry would need to get Justice on his side and make some persuasive legal arguments. Or he would need to get the President back a new Energy Policy Act clarifying federal authority. That would not be unprecedented: the Natural Gas Act of 1938 gives FERC the power to use eminent domain to build interstate pipelines. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 did the same for LNG terminals. 

Now, one might imagine that the current President-elect would be open to this sort of thing. Call them the Trumplines, hand out tax credits, use eminent domain with abandon, limit court appeals. Back to the 1930s! Green energy but with cronyism! What is not to like? 

Well ...

... third, Governor Perry hasn’t exactly owned his accomplishments. In the words of Tom Smith, director of the Texas office of Public Citizen, speaking in 2014: “Perry is bipolar on wind. He plugged into when he saw he could get a political benefit. And now that the winds have changed in the Republican Party, he’s unplugged himself from one of his greatest environmental victories.” In fact, there are now serious moves in Texas to end the CREZ: Troy Fraser himself pushed to repeal the legislation, just as a new expansion of power lines is needed. (Luckily, it failed.) 

To conclude: Governor Perry has a great energy infrastructure record in Texas. He could take that national, get a lot of power lines built and greatly expand wind and solar without ever uttering a word about global warming or carbon emissions or whatever. And it would be an approach that his chief executive should like. Moreover, there is not a whole lot that Perry could or would do at DOE to hurt renewables. So consider it an upside bet.

A far-fetched one, considering that taking his legacy national would require political courage that Perry has never (AFAIK) demonstrated. But who knows? Hope springs eternal. And unlike some of the other cabinet picks, this one at least will probably do no harm. 

The big bear is interfering with the little one

Well. An NPR station in California reported that the head of the Calexit movement, Louis Marinelli, may be orginally from Buffalo but currently resides in, you guessed it, Russia.

Now, Marinelli says that he’s in Yekaterinburg to handle his wife’s immigration. Linking the Calexit movement with Putin on that basis would be unfair. But what would not be unfair is noting that Calexit appears to have been covered mostly by Russian outlets until November 8th. At that point, Shervin Pishevar tossed out his infamous tweet, which got journalists googling. They picked up the Calexit people, and poof, instant news of secessionist sentiment in the Far West.

Robert English (of USC) said it best: “This is what Russia is great at. Their media apparatus is so good at spreading disinformation. It makes the line between nutsos and normal people hard to draw.”

There are many ways in which the next four years could go dramatically wrong. Blue state secessionism is not one of them. But Russian attempts to weaken our tottering democratic institutions, well, that is a worry. Our immune systems are weak; consider how quickly this gobbledygook story spread.

For the curious, here is the proposed initiative. 

It is hard to keep a detached attitude about the internet and politics

First, neo-Nazis organized by the internet booked a bunch of tables at an Italian restaurant around the corner from my house. They gave each other Hitler salutes, including, bizarrely, Tila Tequila. This upset the neighborhood, as you might imagine.

Then, yesterday, my wife found herself delayed while driving our kids back from a swimming pool by police called out because a man with a gun fired shots inside a pizzeria a few blocks away from our house and next to my favorite D.C. bookstore. The shooter had been inspired by a bizarre internet lie that Hillary Clinton had been running a child prostitution ring out of the place. 

That would be disturbing enough, but it seems that the national security adviser to-be believes the pizza-pedophile story, as does his son. (Links go to tweets by Gen. Michael Flynn and Michael Flynn, Jr. No hearsay.) 

This is not normal. This is certainly not normal from people close to the President-elect of the United States, or the President-elect himself. 

This morning, an email correspondent reminded me that in February 2010, in a post about potential failure modes for American political institutions, I had written the following: “The U.S. population might become apathetic and gullible to the point of civic dysfunction.” But I followed up with:

“That said, I see two problems, one potential and unlikely, one with us right now. The potential and (IMHO) unlikely one is that the internet and cable news will somehow interact with America’s ideological cleavages to produce a dysfunctional electorate. I really have my doubts that there is anything to worry about here, but I can of course be convinced otherwise by a good argument.” 

The 2016 election and its aftermath appears to be providing such a good argument. 

Relaxing zoning in California would not shrink Texas by 40%

I seem to lack Twitter-fu, because my questions to people on that platform go unanswered. And so, I pose the question here. 

Matt Kahn now claims that freeing up California housing markets would have caused Texas population to fall by 40%. His evidence? Uh ... well, I do not see any, save that there is a lot of migration into Texas from the West Coast. 

I went to the same IRS data source he used. In 2014-15, net migration into Texas from the rest of the U.S. came to about 59,000. Net migration from both inside and outside the U.S. was around 64,000. Of that total net inflow, about 19% came from California. Californians who moved to Texas earned about $71,000 per family; Texans who moved to California earned about $61,000. Both, interestingly, earned less than the $77,000 average income of Texan families who stayed put. 

How can you use that data to estimate a counterfactual population for Texas? I have no idea! Kahn did not say.

But he ended with a challenge. “My critics must answer the counter-factual of; what would be the population of Texas if it were easy to build in progressive coastal states?”

Challenge accepted!

So let’s stress-test the hypothesis that alt-Texas would have a population of 15.4 million in 2010, rather than 25.3 million.

In 1970 the state had a population of 11.2 million. If its population growth plunged to the national average and stayed there from that point on, Texas in 2010 would have 17.0 million. That is more than 15.4 million, but in the ballpark

How likely is it that an open California housing market would have pulled all those people out of Texas? Well, if Californian development restrictions were biting, then one would expect housing costs in California to rise dramatically relative to Texas during this period. The census measure of median rent is flawed, but it is easy to find. Assuming it measures housing costs reasonably well, what does movement in the California-Texas ratio tell us?

  

Well, that it is unlikely that the migrants to Texas were choosing to go there because California was too expensive. Certainly not during the 1970s or 1990s, at least. By 2000, Texas already had a population of 20.9 million.

In other words, unless something is wrong with the measure of housing costs, it is unlikely that the migrants pulled into a zoning-free California would have come from Texas, at least not before the year 2000. 

My answer to the question “What would be the [2010] population of Texas if it were easy to build in progressive coastal states?” is: at least 20.9 million (the 2000 population), plausibly 23.0 million (no net migration to Texas after 2000), and most likely exactly the same 25.1 million that it actually is. 

Did Jane Jacobs swing the election for Trump?

Added clarification: This post argues that freeing up Californian housing markets after 1970 would not have caused the California population to grow enough to swing the 2016 election.

This idea comes from Matthew Kahn at USC. In 2010, he published a paper showing that more liberal cities in California reduced the number of housing permits they issued, all other things being equal. That is to say, liberal antipathy to housing came from ideological preferences; it wasn’t a secondary effect of liberals being better-educated or concentrating in more geographically-constrained areas or whatever. 

Kahn’s mechanism is that urbanites vote more Democratic, but zoning has constrained the number of urbanites. Without housing constraints, California would have 80 million people with the corresponding number of electoral votes.

But is 80 million likely? Brad Delong has an amusing back-of-the-envelop calculation for what California would look like with an unconstrained housing market. It assumes that Los Angeles is reasonably unregulated and produces a rough estimate of 8 million more people in the state, all in the Bay Area. That would give you 47 million Californians. 

But his supply curve also assumes that Los Angeles is unconstrained save by its population size. Consider the below graph, from Greg Morrow’s (U-Calgary) dissertation. It shows the population that existing zoning would have allowed to live in Los Angeles if completely built-out:

The thing is, zoning restrictions certainly prevented the population of the Westside from doubling or tripling; it is less certain that it kept the population of the entire Southland from growing. Fewer people in Santa Monica, more in Riverside County.

There is another back-of-the-envelop calculation that favors a 47 million counterfactual. Growth restrictions became significant around 1970 and began to bite by 1980. Well, if California had grown at the same rate as Texas since 1970, it would have 48 million people today, not too far off the Delong counterfactual. (If it had grown at the same rate since 1980, California would have 45 million people.) 

Now, to really figure out if this swung the electoral college you would have to guess at where the extra nine million people came from. Some might be from states that received Californian outmigration; others might be immigrants who would go to California rather than elsewhere. But we will ignore that for now. 

Well, 37 million people got California 55 electoral votes in 2010; 45 million (remember, the 2010 population would be below 2016) would have gotten it 65-66 electoral votes. 

No, not really enough to swing the election. 

But if you assume that New York, New Jersey,  and Massachusetts would also be much bigger, then you start getting somewhere ... and there is a completely different channel by which Jane Jacobs could be blamed for the outcome ...

Elections have consequences, but not all consequences are equal

Sometime it seems that every single election of my lifetime had been more important than the one before. But is that really true? What follows is a first take at that question: I hope it provokes a long and contentious comment thread. (Hope, as we again realized ten days ago, really does spring eternal.)

Let’s start a little before I was born.

1960:  Not important, even in retrospect. Would Nixon have backed the Cuban exiles? Would Nixon have tried a Keynesian tax cut? Would either have mattered in the long run? There may have be knock-on effects on the struggle for African-American equality, but those are contingent and impossible to predict.

1964: Yes, very important, but such a blow-out that it’s not worth commenting upon.

1968:  Massively important, both as it seemed at the time and (even more so) in retrospect. A Humphrey administration would have brought universal health care and universal day care, for two things, let alone the implications for American political culture from avoiding Watergate.

1972: See 1964.

1976:  Not important, with a caveat. Gerald Ford would not have been appreciably different from Jimmy Carter. Ford, however, would not have been eligible to run in 1980 under the terms of the 22^nd amendment. (He took office before January 1975, therefore serving “more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President.”) If a Ford term wracked with inflation and recession (which it would have been) allowed Kennedy to beat Reagan in ‘80, then the consequences of having liberal Democrats in office during the subsequent boom might have been very large. But that is speculation; at the time, the stakes were low.

1980:  Unknowable. First, it wasn’t really that close. (See 1972.) In that sense, it’s hard to care about the counterfactual. Second, the American ship-of-state remained remarkably steady under the Reagan administration, given the rhetoric. Finally, its importance hinges on way too many unknowables. (See 1976.) In other words, it probably mattered a lot in the long-run but it really is not easy to say how.

1984: See 1972.

1988:  Not important, really, unless you believe that a Dukakis administration would have ignored the invasion of Kuwait. If you believe that then it was massively important.

1992:  Hard to say. The re-election of George H.W. Bush would have slowed the radicalization of the Republican Party. But at the time, the election didn’t seem earth-shattering save for the issue of health care … and those reforms failed to materialize.

1996:  Yawn.

2000: Massively important … but only in retrospect. Sure, a Gore administration would have kept federal finances in better shape, but that isn’t important. Slightly higher marginal income taxes would have meant slightly lower growth of inequality, but not by much. A Gore-driven Medicare expansion would not have required the fixing that Dubya’s did, but Dubya’s expansion was in fact later fixed. The massive consequences from that election were not foreseeable at the time.

2004:  Not sure. A Kerry administration would have had a rough time disengaging from Iraq. It might have headed off the 2007 financial collapse, but I doubt it. It would have appointed some Supreme Court justices which might have some large consequences going ahead. And then it would have ended with the election of John McCain in 2008. There is a strong case to be made that the stakes were not as high as they seemed at the time.

2008: Too soon to tell. You can make a case that America and the world would be in better shape had John McCain won. (Although his Veep … gulp.) But that hinges on McCain passing a big stimulus, something like Dodd-Frank, a climate change bill and heading off the election of the current President-elect. He would need to hit the quadrifecta while avoiding foreign policy missteps. How likely was that? Moreover, I think the political consequences of having had an African-American president will become clearer in the future, as will Barack Obama’s particular historical role. NOTE: had the 2016 election gone the other way, then I would be more certain in stating that ’08 was an important election, if not 1968-level important.

2012: Important. Obamacare and the Clean Power Plan, for two things. Of course, neither may survive the upcoming administration. See 2008.  

2016: Oh my God. America will change dramatically, or so it seems. 

If this analysis holds water, then two things stand out. First, the only massive future-of-the-Republic election we’ve had up until 2016 happened in 1968. Second, most elections seem less important in retrospect. 

It is possible that 2016 will turn out to be a blip, a strange election prompted by a reaction to the first black president combined with noxious social declines in parts of white America. That will not, however, happen on its own. Opponents of the administration-to-be will need to work very hard and very smart.

Thoughts? Counter-arguments? I would like this to generate discussion; these conclusions are far from firm.

Things can get worse

One thing to consider is that the U.S. election results just make it a lot more likely that Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) will be elected the 21st president of the United Mexican States under its current constitution. AMLO is a nationalist and an opponent of the current president, the one who prostrated himself before an American candidate.

AMLO was a fine mayor of Mexico City, but has shown himself to have doubtful conviction about democracy. His election would be a major risk, particularly in the context of a hostile relationship with the USA.

Read the link, please. It is a sobering thought. 

How Cheltenham voted

We all know how Pennsylvania voted. But my wife and I, with our children, did not work to get out the vote across the entire state. We worked to get out the vote in one little suburban township bordering the city of Philadelphia. Did our efforts contribute to the tragic result of six days ago? Did Cheltenham, like Philadelphia, fail to meet its 2012 vote?

Thankfully, it appears not. Our little borough matched its 2012 turnout and exceeded its 2012 vote. (Data sources here and here.) 

Our small efforts did not fail, even if they were not matched elsewhere. Individual efforts matter. Both to your own willingness to go on and to the ability of the country to overcome. Or the world. 

The comparisons with 1933 are not reassuring

I do not think that the coming years will be as bad as this link implies. But Hans-Joachim Voth is a sober economic historian. He does not rant. I am not even sure that he is a liberal, by the American definition. But it is a spooky piece.

Excerpted below:

Here is my attempt to think through the troubling parallels with 1933, between the “Seizure of Power” by Hitler and the surprise election of Trump. Of course, Trump is no Hitler, and history doesn’t repeat itself — at least not 1:1. With that in mind, this is my small checklist of things that look, broadly speaking, similar - and those that do not:

Similarities:

• A broad groundswell of dissatisfaction with the status quo, and especially the politicians seen to be responsible for it.
• Related to this, a message by the strongman that combines nationalism, xenophobia, and a sense that one’s own country has been headed in the wrong direction for some time. Let’s make America great again? Deutschland erwache (Germany, wake up — meaning a rebirth of Germany as a strong and proud nation once more). Your own country is amazing, ueber alles, but it has recently fallen into an abyss. And part of what has gone wrong is that the wrong people have been let in — Jews in the case of Germany, Latinos in the case of the US. 
• A growing sense of economic despair — easy to rationalize in Depression Germany, harder to explain in the US in 2016, where things are mostly going well (though some distress is clearly evident in the rust belt).
• Voters who are more enthused about “teaching a lesson” than what the candidate they voted for actually stands for. Germans in 1932 didn’t go through a checklist of policy items that the Nazis supported, from war to genocide, and liking every point, ticked the box for the Führer; they mostly had enough of austerity, misery, the politics of gridlock and seeming ineffectiveness of democratic leaders. Related to this, a surprising willingness to tolerate crassness and a complete lack of tact and etiquette from the leader in question... If you had told me that anyone can insult women the way Trump did, on the record, and have ANY chance to be elected, I would have laughed six months ago. The Hitler movement, of course, outdid any of this in terms of public declarations about what they would do once in power, what to think of their opponents, etc.
• A lackadaisical disregard for the finer details and a belief in the “triumph of the will”. Neither Hitler nor Trump care(d) about details, and sweating over the fine print of proposals is not their thing (a big difference with Stalin, who made a very effective bureaucrat-in-chief).  Watching the debates, it is very hard to believe anyone took Trump seriously as a man to lead political decision-making. But then, who would ever think that a foaming-at-the-mouth Austrian with a funny moustache could be taken seriously by anyone?
• Neither got a majority of the vote. Hitler maxed out at 44% in the semi-free election of March 33; Trump failed to win 50% of the vote.
• A right-wing elite that thinks they can control the populist strongman. Here, the Republican leadership sounds awfully like former Vice Chancellor von Papen and friends. They famously thought of Hitler as the “drummer” — a populist whose appeal was useful to them but could be controlled easily. 
• A democracy where significant parts of the population have given up on central elements of their constitution - not quite the “democracy without democrats” that historians write about in the case of Weimar, but one in which one of the oldest democracies on earth is basically governed by people (who were in turn elected by many of the people) who think the constitution is a joke, checks and balances are for woozies and elected representatives on average deserve no respect.
• A center-left elite that largely fails to take the threat seriously. German newspapers in late December 1932 were congratulating themselves that the Nazi menace was receding, and that Hitler would never become Chancellor. Enter the “big data” political forecaster-quacks here, and an elite discourse that underestimated Trump from the first day of his candidacy until the 8th of November.
• A great willingness to use military force to further one’s ends, and not only as a last resort.
• A stock market that seems to like what it sees...
• A willingness to use infrastructure (and deficit) spending to get the economy going again.
• A rejection of internationalist organizations and multilateral solutions for world-wide problems - the League of Nations in the case of Hitler, the climate change accords in the case of Trump. 
• A willingness to visit violence on the opponent. Ok, this is a bit of a stretch. The Nazis organized street fighters, the storm troopers, who not only beat up Communists and democrats, but committed murder — murder, condoned in some cases directly by the Nazi leaders — like the infamous Potempa murdersof 1932. Trump did not condone anything like that, or organize systematic violence, but... those comments about Hillary Clinton’s security detail do sound awfully like an invitation to political murder.
• A very loose sense of economic reality. Hitler clearly had no coherent economic program, other than spending on roads and arms and worrying about the consequences later. If there was any sense in Nazi policies, it was accidental or the result of right-wing elite input. Trump’s economic policies so far are equally farcical... ok, perhaps not on the scale of Feder money (the idea that bills should lose their value within a pre-specified period).

Differences:

• While Trump’s rhetoric against Latinos is pretty amazing, he doesn’t think of them as all-powerful puppet masters controlling the US today. Whatever went wrong in the US recently, according to Trump, is not directly driven by Latinos themselves; their presence is a symptom, not a cause of what he and his supporters think is a malaise
• German fascism had, if anything, a more progressive image of women. While there was a big policy push to get them out of the workforce, and back to children and the kitchen — there was also a celebration of “Germanic” heroines like the test pilot Hannah Reitsch, or the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.
• No belief in “Lebensraum” — there is no potty theory leading Trump to push for territorial expansion. 
• A conciliatory start. Hitler and friends did not begin their reign by trying to suddenly sound moderate and generous towards their internal opponents (though they did go easy in terms of foreign policy aggression until Germany was stronger militarily...)
• Hitler was very eloquent and a highly talented public speaker. Nobody can accuse Trump of either...
• The right-wing elite in Weimar supported Hitler (in the end); in the US, they mostly opposed Trump. We’ll see where the opportunists jump once the inauguration has taken place.
• No aftermath of military defeat that affected voting intentions and everyday politics, as did WW I and reparations. No hyperinflation that destroyed a good part of the wealth of the middle class (ht/ Laurence Copeland).
• No business empire to take care of in the case of Hitler; while he liked money and rewarded the tax inspector who left him alone over unpaid income tax for “Mein Kampf”, there was no secondary business agenda there that might interfere with political aims.

So what does it all mean? Some kind of autocracy is coming. Something somewhere between Putin and Berlusconi, if we are lucky; something worse if we are unlucky. The thing that gets me the most is the almost pathological unwillingness on the left to believe what the candidate has been saying... Hitler’s program was available in print, and Donald Trump is not an empty slate that deserves “an open mind.” Both have an agenda, and unbelievable, even unimaginable as they seemed just shortly before, they both probably mean every word. In the face of a political elite that is fast flip-flopping to the winning side, a spineless media, and a large silent majority of people who don’t give a fig about their democracy, I don’t put too much trust in institutions, the checks and balances of the U.S. constitution, or civic society stopping even the worst excesses.

How bad could this get? Gratuitous wars in, say, the Middle East (Iran), the Far East (Korea), or Latin America (Cuba)? Possible, but perhaps not that likely. The professional input from the Pentagon will limit what can happen, to some extent — but as we saw with GWB, only to some extent. Protectionism? It's a wild card; if Trump is energetic and focused, the US withdraws from the WTO and repeals NAFTA, this can start to look amazingly ugly quite quickly. A brutal rift within NATO that de facto abandons the Baltic Republics to a resurgent Russia? Not likely, but suddenly a possibility. Deportation of illegal immigrants and the wall? Don't rule that out at all; deportations rates have varied a lot, and were actually up under Obama; there is something awkward about tolerating a large number of people who are breaking the law in one's country, and while the social consequences of suddenly righting this are very ugly, there are many fascets to this argument. A lot of pressure on the media to fall into line? For sure. And a Supreme Court that can roll back decades of social progress, down to Roe vs Wade; very likely. Hugely expanded powers for snooping and incarcerating people suspected of terrorism, including US citizens; again, quite likely. An attack on affirmative action and the like? Possible. All of this is suddenly within reach as possibly acceptable policies, and the greatest hope is that “they don't mean it” and that implementation will not be very vigorous. I hope I am wrong, but to me it looks like the world in four years time will not look like a place you imagined possible 6 months ago.

This was a normal election but it should not have been

The title of this short post was designed for Twitter.

Like many, I have been thinking a lot over the past five days. Unlike many, I have not been saying much. And now I realize why.

Basically, 2016 appears to have been a standard-issue close-run election. There is not much evidence of a “whitelash” in terms of either a surge in white turnout or a giant swing in white opinion. There is evidence of drops in nonwhite enthusiasm. In certain key places, this may be linked to voter supression (I’m looking at you, Milwaukee) but it mostly isn’t (I’m looking at you, Philadelphia). And that polling error? Well, it seems huge because the race was so close, but it really wasn’t that big.

This is why the election is so disturbing. You had one candidate blow through every single norm in American political life. You had one candidate show exceptional ignorance and demonstrate an exceptionally nasty character. And yet it ended up as a completely normal post-1994 election.

That is disturbing. We can only pray that it is not something that the country has cause to regret. 

Strange phrasing in an article about Calexit

Okay, “Calexit” is strange phrasing by itself. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

The New York Times ran a story on a fringy California secession movement given newfound momentum by the election result. California secession, whatever, terrible stupid immoral idea. And predictable bloviation, considering the election outcome. No cause for a blog post.

But what I noticed was the way the Times discussed the secession process. They actually laid out how it would work. “California cannot, of course, just pick up and leave. Even if the state wanted to, an exit would require two-thirds approval of both the House and Senate in Washington, along with the blessing of 38 state legislatures — a feat analysts say is implausible.”

Something seemed ominous in actually laying that process out. Not about the prospect of a divorce, but about the state of mind of the people interviewed by the author. 

There is a great deal of ruin in a nation

 Including our own. Good night and God save the United States.

GOTV in Cheltenham

Back in 2004, I helped run a campaign office in southern Broward County. In 2008, I canvassed. (Well, in the primaries, at least.) In 2012, I limited myself to donating money. I suspect that the trend was not a coincidence/

This time, though, we felt like we had to do something more direct. So we contacted the campaign and volunteered to go where they needed us. To my surprise, that turned out to be Pennsylvania. Virginia, it seems, has leapfrogged Pennsylvania to become practically a solid blue state. At this rate, it would not surprise me to see the Old Dominion become as ignored as the Bay State by 2020. 

We told them that we were willing to go anywhere in southeastern PA within an hour of either West Chester or downtown Philly. Again to my surprise, that turned out to be Cheltenham, a small suburb right on the Philadelphia city line to the north. Like, straight to the north: drive up Broad Street from downtown and bam, you’ll cross into it at the aptly-named Cheltenham Avenue.

One thing I gotta mention: Cheltenham and Philly have one of the starkest city-suburb boundaries that I have seen in a long time, if ever. Wander around the north Bronx: unless you are watching the street signs change color, you’ll never really know when you’ve left the city. Ditto Queens and Nassau; the places where the difference becomes starker are divided by a big giant freeway. Where I live, friends have actually walked the wrong way out into Bethesda because it looks more urban than when you head towards downtown.  Brookline to Boston does not jump out at you. Etcetera. 

But Philly? Jesus. One minute, potholes and run-down taxpayers; the next, smooth roads and rolling hills. Cheltenham, in fact, is not that rich and not all of it is that nice, but damn that border is stark.

The Clinton campaign office is in a perfectly pleasant strip mall of the sort that could be in California. In fact, it really had a spanking-new Sunbelt feel to it, were it not for the fact that the house across the street from the Walgreen’s was built in 1682. 

GOTV efforts do not involve randomly knocking on doors. Rather, they give you lists of people already identified as supporters and tell you to go out and make sure that they have a plan to get to the polls. Back in 2004, those supporters were identified very crudely. (The link goes to a copy of the voter contact manual we actually used back then.)

Since then, I’m told, identifying these supporters has gotten more sophisticated ... but not that much from what we could see. Every day we went out, we got a printout of houses marked on a neighborhood map. The voters identified were basically registered Democrats who hadn’t turned out in the last election. If there was more sophisticated targeting going on, it sure wasn’t obvious. Big data still looks pretty small.

In fact, let me tell you how small the data is: some of the intel we are out there gathering is whether a subdivision is gated or not. That’s right; the offices don’t know for sure whether they can send their people into a neighborhood. Since they don’t want to waste time on election day, they want early canvassers to find that stuff out ... but that is exactly what we were doing in Hollywood, Florida, twelve years ago. You would think that in someplace as long-contested in Pennsylvania these things would be known, but apparently not. 

The first time we went canvassing they sent us right into a gated community, followed by a closed apartment building. Of course, we had no idea that we weren’t supposed to go into the gated areas. (In 2004, we had no compunctions. If you could get people in, you sent people in.) So we parked our car outside one of the automated exits and strolled right in. The area was integrated and heavily Jewish. Lots of mezuzahs on the doors of scattered townhouses. It lacked sidewalks, which I always find a WTF thing: why would anyone want to live somewhere without sidewalks? And the townhouses were packed together with big open spaces. It sort of felt like a big communal park, a housing project for people fleeing Philadelphia in the 1980s. 

But to return to the point, it might have been gated, but nobody batted an eye at our presence, not passers-by, not people walking their dogs, not the people whose doors we knocked on. One guy did open the door (we had identified his wife) and when we said we were with Hillary and looking for his spouse he gruffly told us, “You can go away now.” But everyone else was shockingly nice.

I could go on with a million discussions, but that would get boring. Instead, let me go to the most pro-GOP neighborhood we found during our expeditions: Oak Lane Road. Now, there were no Trump signs there. In fact, although you can see huge numbers of Trump-Pence signs scattered across highway medians and planed in intersections, people in southeastern Pennsylvania seem to be very reluctant to put them on their lawns. But we did see some Pat Toomey signs around, a sign that the GOP is not nonexistent on the ground. 

Oak Lane Road is what a racist realtor would call a neighborhood in transition. It is integrated, but you get a depressing feeling that its integration is just the interval between the arrival of the first non-white person and the departure of the last güero. The houses are good-sized ones on oversized lots. The lawns are all well kept, better than my own in Northwest D.C. But many of the houses show small signs of decay, even if the shrubs are lovingly tended, and a few looked to be on the edge of abandonment. The architecture doesn’t change much, but it becomes whiter as you move from New Second Street northeast to Ashbourne Road.

I cannot help but wonder if the Toomey signs were related to the demography. 

It turned out that a lot of the voters we identified were first-timers. So we spent a lot of time with their mothers (always mom), trying to figure out a plan to get them to vote, especially since a lot of them were elsewhere in the county but had not re-registered. Early voting in Pennsylvania is possible only at the county seat, where you can vote absentee in person. That is what I used to do in Cambridge, but getting to the election office involved only a short stroll, not an annoying drive to Norristown. So we would help with transport, or get people forms, or whatever we could. Plenty of times that meant just passing the buck to the precinct office. 

Sometimes you find someone who just seemed overwhelmed by life. For example, there was one young single mother with multiple cheery small children. She looked ... exhausted. Not sad, not tragic, just exhausted. My wife did not think that she would vote on a work day, and I sadly think my wife is right. She was the best argument for early voting that I had ever seen.

More fun was the house with the fence and the “Beware of the Dog” sign that concealed a fucking scary dog. The owners’ kids popped out onto their porch, followed by the owner, a big muscled tattooed guy who would have looked scary if you found big muscled tattooed guys with children’s toys scattered on their porch to be scary. He was pretty nice, actually, although he did insist that we had it wrong and he was “a nobody supporter, neutral.”

Ah, maybe.

There was also the 40-something white lady who wanted to have a long election conversation on the porch. So we obliged! We met a lot of MSNBC-junkies on this gig. Her house, by the way, was one of the most run-down ones on the block. She worried a lot about the effect of the upcoming transit strike on turnout. (Once again, we were there for her two older daughters, not for her.)

I could go on. It was a lot of fun and everyone was charmed by the kids, who had a ball. (We would call it quits before they got cranky.) On another day we met a family where the door was open and the kids running in and out. They saw us coming, and an adult voice said,  “speak Spanish, they’ll go away.” Speaking Spanish to us didn’t work, but telling us to go away did, even if their youngest boy and my eldest boy struck up a discussion about toy weaponry. And the apartment buildings, where we could not go in but the doormen always turned out to be enthusiastic Hillary supporters.

So vote if you haven’t. Soon this will be over and hopefully the Fat Crybaby will sing. We’re with her.

And how have you spent most of your October weekends?

Chester County, Pennsylvania

Happy Election Day? I wish. Anyway, D.C. has early voting. I voted with my son in tow on Halloween; my wife took my daughter to the polls a few days later. We voted for President, for city council members, and for the District of Columbia to become the Douglass Commonwealth; we kicked ourselves for not having researched the school board elections. (Discussion of D.C. statehood at the link.) 

We have been spending our weekends campaigning in Pennsylvania. I hope to write a little about that before the polls close this evening. Surprisingly (or not) the campaign has consistently sent us to a near-suburb of Philly called Cheltenham. As a result, even though we know Chester County well and sleep there often (when we aren’t with my cousin in Fairmount) we have not done any electioneering there. 

Fortunately, Emma Green of the Atlantic is prepared to step into the breach. Her profile of Chester County is not especially incisive or deep. But it is accurate. And it is very funny how Trump somehow confused Downingtown for a depressed area. 

The county has a pleasant, if in some places stark, urban core in West Chester:

And also rural areas where the kids can build their immune systems in actual farms:

It is a great place for unsupervised little boys to risk their lives. 

Anyway, for those of you who want to know what the election looks like on the ground, you could do worse than the Atlantic profile. 

Liveblogging the third debate

Why? I don't know. I don't quite feel the dread of last time, but I'm not happy.

10:39:  I am in shock that the Republican nominee refused to accept the results of the election. 

10:36:  Why 

10:31:  My wife: "Replace it with what??"

10:21:  I couldn't follow Trump there. 

10:08:  The banana republic talk is back. Oh sweet Mary.

1o:07:  Oh shit

10:05:  We're back to one senator being able to change the law.

10:04: Chris Wallace is doing a great job.

10:01:  Here it comes. The interruption.

9:59:  She didn't add the Central Park Five.

9:55:  He just caught himself. I am surprised.

9:52:  My wife, who wanted to vote for John Kasich, can't watch this. "Blood boiling."

9:43:  Was that a bait? "My husband"

9:41:  Why is saying that there will be more free trade than ever? I'm at a loss here.

9:40:  Why is he going back to NATO and Saudi Arabia?

9:30: I have nothing to say.

9:27:  I am bemused at Trump pointing out the Obama deportations. 

9:25: Go Chris Wallace!

9:25:  Trump's poker face is interesting.

9:23:  I am not clear as to why Trump thinks that federal authorities are refusing to arrest "bad hombres."

9:21:  Trump seems very reasonable in comparison. 

9:19:  Hillary's response to Trump's overheated rhetoric works well for me. She's making a Libertarian case.

9:09:  "I truly don't think will happen." That's odd. He's calm, though.

When ideology and self-interest meet, Ecuador edition

 The Correa administration admitted to cutting Wikileaks’ internet access over the recent releases of strategically-timed hacks from Podesta’s account. Good for them! They claim that the decision is a high-minded refusal to intervene in the internal affairs of another state, regardless of that state’s imperial record.

But it’s also in Ecuador’s interest. Not because a Clinton administration will be particularly good, of course. Rather, a Trump administration will be astoundingly bad. In immigration and trade, Ecuador may strategically close its market but it depends on the United States remaining open. And it very much depends on a structure of international law that bind investment disputes and prevent the U.S. from unabashedly exercising its power in the pursuit of commercial interest. (I wrote a whole book about that.) 

So good for President Correa, but this is a case where the decision is as much in the national interest as the right thing to do. 

Liveblogging the debate?

Maybe. Last time I added some value (on VAT, or infrastructure costs) but this time I am just settling to watch something I don't want to watch.

10:33: Trump did not crash and burn.

10:29: No direct questions about climate change.

10:26: This was unpleasant to watch. I do not know if she should have gone more on offense.

10:21: Black Americans living in in an inner city:

10:16: Why does he repeat "Latino" and "Hispanic" in the same sentence?

10:10: You cannot actually seize and occupy an entire city in a sneak attack.

10:08: Both moderators are great.

9:55:  He thinks like a dictator. How can one Senator change the tax code?

9:48:  I don't think there's anything wrong with a politician being willing to compromise while declaring that they are not. But in modern American culture, that's a hard thing to defend. Which really is sad.

9:47:  It would be an act of war to forcibly deport people into a sovereign state that did not want them to enter. 

9:38:  AFAIK, Trump is lying right now; there is no evidence that anyone knew what the San Bernadino terrorists were planning.

9:37:  It sounds like Trump is proposing one giant national insurance exchange.

9:36:  Great follow-up!

9:31:  The similarities between Donald Trump and Hugo Chávez are striking.

9:28:  The interruptions.

9:24:  Oh my God.

9:23:  This is unprecedented. A candidate is threatening another candidate with the use of federal authority if she loses.

9:18:  I am very sad listening to this, especially about the case that Hillary was assigned to defend.

9:16:  "The African Americans." The definite article is strange.

9:13:  My emotions are somber right now.

9:09:  So far, so calm.

9:05:  No handshakes.

9:04:  I feel a sinking sensation. Physically.

Ford is not moving jobs to Mexico

Head, hits desk. Eric Loomis (hat tip: Andrew Reeves) just repeated the Trump lie that Ford is moving jobs to Mexico. Ford is expanding production in Mexico, it is true. But Ford is keeping up production in the United States and Ford would be expanding production in Mexico even without NAFTA. 

The biggest piece of evidence for this is that Ford says so. But hell, don’t trust them. Look at what NAFTA changed.

Before NAFTA, the U.S. tariff on small cars was only 2.5%. That is not nothing, but nor is it enough to compensate for lower labor costs. Note that the real exchange rate of the peso has fallen by 5.4% since the beginning of the year. 2½ percent is barely a speed bump. Now, if you want to argue about NAFTA, you can argue about the 25% tariff that the United States imposed on trucks. That was a real tariff. But Ford isn’t moving truck production; it’s moving small cars. And NAFTA has fuck-all to do with that.

There is a discussion to be had about NAFTA. But I must wonder if Loomis is willing to have it in good faith.

What could Mexico do about Trump?

Eduardo Porter asks just that in today’s New York Times! He suggests targeted trade sanctions, a la the way Mexico responded to America’s refusal to admit Mexican trucks. He also cites former foreign minister Jorge Castañeda suggesting that Mexico could sue, both in American courts and international tribunals. 

Alejandro Hope was there first on this tip! There are three more slings in Mexico’s quiver: (1) organizing popular support in the U.S.; (2) halting cooperation with the United States; and (3) diplomatic isolation. It is all risky, but rolling over for a fat crybaby in the Oval Office would be worse. 

Of course, Mexico will stuck with President Peña until 2018. And Peña, well, for all the dramatic domestic reforms he has ushered is not known for his spine. 

Ian Bremmer is blowing smoke

In this video, he says that he has not met a single Fortune 100 CEO who would change their investment strategy based on who wins the election, so the election does not matter. 

But that is just a fucking weird claim.

Look at the list. Number one is Walmart. Maybe Walmart’s CEO does not believe that a Trump Administration would hike trade barriers between the U.S. and its suppliers. But there is no goddamned way that is true, not in a world where debate performances move exchange rates. 

Berkshire Hathaway cares a lot about the Clean Power Plan. Ditto ExxonMobil, Chevron, Valero, Marathon, Energy Transfer Equity, ConocoPhillips, Exelon, and Tesoro. The car companies care a lot about CAFE standards. The banks care a huge amount about repealing or amending Dodd-Frank. Alphabet lives and dies on tiny changes in intellectual property. (To be fair, I doubt Trump has any sort of I.P. policy at all. But that lack will be almost as much a concern as much as having a definite one.) Boeing cares about the Iran deal. The medical and insurance companies care about Obamacare. The defense companies care a whole lot about defense budgets.

I could go on. I will, however, call bullshit on my man from Chelsea, Massachusetts. The claim is untrue on its face, unless Ian is speaking to a select group of CEOs ... in which case he is deliberately misleading his viewers by implying that said CEOs are representative.

Now, I can believe that the radical tax cuts a Trump Administration would usher in would not affect investment that much. But not at all? Corporate tax rate cuts of the magnitude Trump is proposing will have no effect on investment decisions?

And then he throws out this pearl of wisdom: “Ultimately, Obama was a radically different President than Bush and how much difference did he make in terms of policy?” Well, if your counterfactual is Hugo Chávez, then maybe not much. But if your counterfactual is hundreds of billions of dollars of investment flows then he made quite a fucking big difference. Dodd-Frank, the Recovery Act, Obamacare, the CPP, just for starters.

What I do not understand is why Bremmer would make such a silly ... oh, heck, stupid claim. Bremmer has built a multi-million dollar political risk business. He has mastered tweeting. (Nate Jensen is better.) He knows what he is doing. His brand is not mindless contrarianism. Quite the reverse, actually. 

So what the hell is up with this stupid video? I lost IQ points from watching it.

Liberals against carbon taxes ... seriously

There are some interesting contests out there this year that do not involve a fat crybaby! With ColoradoCare sinking in the polls (for understandable reasons) all eyes turn to the other Washington for initiatives worthy of the great laboratories of democracy. There we have Proposition 732, the brainchild of the same economist who gave you this presentation. Prop 732 would:

1. Impose a $15 per ton carbon tax in 2017 and $25 in 2018;
2. Raise the tax thereafter at the rate of inflation+3.5% until it reaches $100 per ton (2048 at current inflation);
3. Cut the state sales tax from 6.5% to 5.5%;
4. Cut the business and occupation (B&O) tax on manufacturers or research from 0.484% to 0.001% of gross receipts;
5. Raise the sales-tax refundable credit for low-income families rises from 10% of the federal EITC to 25%. For a family of four earning $40,000 per year, that would come to about $500, up from $200. For the same family at the poverty line ($24,000) the credit would be almost $800, up from a little over $300.

The idea is to replace some of the state’s most onerous business taxes with carbon taxes, while subsidizing the poorest citizens to protect them from rises in their electricity and gasoline bills. According to the state fiscal impact statement, the net result would be a small tax cut: by 2021,  carbon tax revenues of $2.2 billion would replace lost B&O taxes of $470 million, lost sales taxes of $1.7 billion, and tax credits of $300 million, for a total tax cut of $250 million per year. For what it is worth, using the projections laid out in the impact statement, the loss would reach $620 million per year in 2048, when the carbon tax maxes out. 

In fact, revenue losses will be greater, if the carbon tax leads to greater-than-expected cuts in the use of fossil fuels. But this should be measured against total state tax revenues, which are currently around $19 billion and should reach $25 billion (nominal) by 2021. 

Okay, then! This sounds like a dream reform. Republicans get big cuts in taxes they hate and an overall tax cut. They also get rebates for the poorer GOP voters out in the eastern reaches of the state. Moreover, Washington has lots of hydropower (see picture). Including transport, it uses fossil fuels for only 53% of its energy. Power generators won’t like it, of course, but they can pass on most of the additional costs to consumers. Poorer consumers and industrial operations are protected. The middle class will lose economically, but help the environment.

Of course, I am sure most of you are now snorting. “Hah!” you think. “The GOP would never be so reasonable, not even up in deep blue Washington. And middle class people when push comes to shove won’t want to pay to save the environment. This is, like ColoradoCare, just a phantasm.”

You would be half right. There is opposition. Only ... and this is hard to believe ... it is not from the GOP or the middle class. The GOP is neutral. (Which is not to say that GOP voters are neutral; they oppose the initiative 48%-35%.) No, the goddamned opposition is from the Democrats. 

Whaaaaa? No, really. The Democrats are angry that there will be a net tax loss, no matter how small. They do not think that a carbon tax should be offset at all. The Sierra Club is angry that the revenues are not used to subsidize renewables. Other lefty groups are angry because ... oh, who knows? 

In short, with lukewarm Republican opposition, a carbon tax would sail through if the left supported it. But big groups do not, either because they have an anti-tax cut religion or because they want the revenues to buy their own pet rocks. How in the name of God you justify that position, I do not know. I invite a member of the Washington Sierra Club or Democratic Party to school me.

Well, the currency markets have an opinion on the debate

So I took a peek at the Asian markets, and to the right you can see how the peso did against the dollar. The peso strengthed (down on this graph is stronger) 15 minutes in; it then soared between 9:30 and 9:45. It kept rising at a slightly slower rate until the debate ended at 10:40.

Looking over my liveblog, it looks like the rise started around the time the Fat Crybaby called a $13 million loan from his father “small.” 

Now, the move is not that dramatic. The peso rose from 5.0¢ to 5.2¢. But it seems as though people who have money at stake think the debate moved the needle. It also shows that people with money at stake do believe that a Trump administration would be a bad thing for that country’s economy. 

Liveblogging the debate

I'm going to try to add value.

10:40:  Next time I will tweet. Gah, twitter.

10:38:  Whew. He will accept a defeat.

10:37:  Sweet Mary mother of Christ that Mr. Holt felt the need to ask that question. Oh my God. 

10:30:  It is true that B-52s are old, but they are still awesome:

10:28:  “I would certainly not do first strike ... I would certainly not take anything off the table.” Huh? And now he wants us to outsource North Korea policy to China.

10:27:  “We can’t defend Japan.” WTF?

10:26: “Your president.” Oh boy. He can’t help himself.

10:16:  She is ignoring the “take the oil” comment. Mistake? I really have no goddamned idea. You can’t, of course, “take the oil” with only 10,000 troops, considering as the oil needs to be exported through hostile territory. You also can’t, well, take Syrian oil wells by occupying Iraq; the Islamic State’s oil revenues come from Syria.

10:11:  That 400-pound hacker image is going to be very hard to wash out of my mind. 

10:09:  Was it a missed opportunity to miss talking about the Central Park Five? I suppose not; after all, I had only just moved to California when it all happened. It probably doesn't resonate for most of the country.

10:06:  I have no idea how this would fly in a room of white swing voters. It isn’t going over well in a room full of black people.

10:02: “I say nothing.” Whoa! That was ... whoa. Really? Nothing to say to black people about birtherism?

9:59: “You decided to stay home.” Asshole. “I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate.” Dis!

9:57: It’s kind of amazing that he just denied that murders fell in NYC after stop-and-frisk ended. Still, in general, this is surprisingly civil.

9:56: If she wanted to, she could hit him here with the 1989 ad he took out about the Central Park Five. 

9:55: In a hellhole:

9:46:  Secretary Clinton doesn’t want to use the words “law and order”?

9:43:  There is in fact an issue with the cost of public works construction in the United States. I don’t hear any serious solutions, but there is a real issue here. 

9:43: “If I don’t get there one way, I’m gonna get to Pennsylvania Avenue another.” 

9:39:  I think Trump just pitched one down the middle at Secretary Clinton about the Iraq War.

9:36:  Conflicts of interest.

9:33:  Thank you Mr. Holt, for calling Trump on the audit bullshit. Will Hillary call him out that he has provided no proof about the audit?

9:31:  “A big fat ugly bubble ... the Fed is doing political!”

9:29:  I am at a bit of a loss about Trump's shouting. I have to say I didn’t expect that.

9:26: Fighting ISIS her entire adult life?

9:24:  I should be tweeting this, no?

9:21:  How do Trump’s interruptions come across?

9:18:  Trump is referring to Solyndra. The program as a whole made money for the U.S.

9:16: I am surprised that she isn’t following up on the fact that Trump just called a $14 million loan “small.”

9:14: A VAT is basically a sales tax. Mexican and American companies both pay it. As they pay state sales taxes on their final sales in the United States. 

Marking my Brexit (and 2016) predictions to market

Yeah, this post (and this one) do not look so good. Mark to market. Lesson: polls can shift, a lot.

But to defend my honor, Sam Wang’s latest projections are making this post look pretty good. If you take a two-percent uniform swing over current polling, both Michigan and Wisconsin turn into toss-ups, with Pennsylvania staying blue. No flipping Wisconsin before Michigan. 

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

Of course, I feel I need to point out that the fact that the polls are so close means that most of the people on my Democratic email chains were entirely wrong in their models about American politics. Fat Crybaby is not bobbing dead in the water.

Say, where is our resident troll? You know, the one who got mad at me for telling someone in a Hitler costume to leave a children’s party? I keep expecting to show up and start chanting about the terrible things that will befall us when the Fat Crybaby wins. 

Robert Shiller is a genius, but ...

... this essay is just weird.

I mean, he predicts that there will be a movement to abolish nation states, not from some right-wing spectre of angry foreigners bearing down on the gates, but from citizens clamoring for more free-trade agreements, the demand for which will ... uh ... “stem from daily interactions on computer monitors with foreigners whom we can see are intelligent, decent people – people who happen, through no choice of their own, to be living in poverty. This should lead to better trade agreements, which presuppose the eventual development of orders of magnitude more social insurance to protect people within a country during the transition to a more just global economy.”

I mean, okay. Moral impulses prompted by electronic interactions with faraway poor people will lead to a popular groundswell that will both usher in an era of global free trade and increase social insurance transfers by a factor of ten. Even ignoring for a moment that OECD social spending is already at 22% of GDP and is therefore unlikely to increase to 216%, it is hard to see the theory of human behavior that causes people with sympathy for faraway poor people to demand more trade with them. 

The irony? Shiller has done so much to demolish the idiocy of using some imaginary homo economicus to set policy. But now, suddenly, homo economicus is back and plotting revolution in the most off-base essay I have read in a very long time. 

Filed under 2016 election for lack of a better place. After all, without the current election I would not have bothered to write this response. 

Alabama is not Mississippi

OK, that is clearly true. I just spent a big chunk of time in Alabama, I know this to be true. 

But John Marshall at Talking Points Memo is understandably surprised that a recent poll shows the Fat Crybaby only 2 points ahead in Mississippi while 21 points ahead in “the fairly politically and demographically similar state of Alabama next door.”

That cannot be right, can it?

Well, yes, it can! 

According to the Census Bureau, eligible voters in Mississippi are 60% white and 35% black. In next door, Alabama they are 68% white and 25% black. Also according to the census bureau, black people in both states turn out to vote at rates around six points higher than whites. (2012 turnout in both states was around 60%; 2008 turnout was 63% in Mississippi and 64% in Alabama.) That shakes out to an electorate that is 59% white and 38% black in Mississippi but 68% white and 28% black in Alabama.

Now assume that Hillary Clinton will get 95% of the black vote, 80% of the Latino vote, and 75% of the other vote in both states. (These assumptions do not really matter, but they make exposition easier.) What then needs to be true about the white vote for Clinton to receive 46% of the total vote in Mississippi but only 36% in Alabama?

Well, she would have to get 13% of white vote in Mississippi and 10% in Alabama. That is only a three-point difference. It is totally believable and certainly within the margin of error in the crosstabs. I can certainly believe it. If you give her 13% of the white vote in Alabama, her share there rises only two points; give her 10% of whites in Mississippi and her share there falls by only one point. 

Let’s check this with the 2012 results. Romney won 55% in Mississippi, but 61% in Alabama Obama got only 38% of the vote in Alabama, versus 44% in Mississippi. The six point difference in the 2012 election is less than the ten point difference in the 2016 polls, but ten points is not so great as to be unbelievable. 

Now, Mississippi is far from a swing state. To win there, Clinton needs to get 20% of the white vote, which ain’t gonna be easy. But that is a lower bar than in Alabama, where getting 20% of the white vote would get her only 43% of the total. In Alabama, she needs to pull in 31% of the white vote to win. 

Having been in Alabama, getting to 20% (let alone 31%) feels impossible. There is some deep-seated identity voting going on, more like political parties in Trinidad and Tobago than what most would consider normal American politics. (See here for more on ethnic politics in Trinidad.)

Many white people in Alabama were super nice. Think the amused gentleman in the pink shirt. But in picking the photos for this post, I noticed a lot of photos like the second one above, where people in the background are staring at us, especially if my wife was taking the picture. (Look at the father and son directly behind us. My wife takes pictures like a fashion photographer, so we have 15 full seconds of frames: they were staring the whole time.) That does not happen in family photo albums from the northeast or Florida. 

Yes, it is anecdotal, but I just do not think that it will be easy for any Democratic candidate to break the 20% barrier among white voters in Alabama (or culturally, albeit not demographically) state of Mississippi for some time to come. The WaPo-SurveyMonkey poll results are plausible. They may even hold until November. But they are not a sign that Mississippi is turning purple any time soon. 

But to repeat the punchline: given the very different demographics in the two states, it is quite reasonable to believe that Clinton is only two points behind in Mississippi while being 21 points down in Alabama. 

There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, redux

The title of this post is a famous line in the Ford-Carter presidential debate in 1976.

President Ford was asked a question about the Helsinki agreement, which according to the moderator, recognized that “the Russians have dominance in Eastern Europe.” Now, outside the Baltics, the moderator’s claim was false! The agreement did not admit that Moscow had the right to govern the Warsaw Pact countries. In fact, the agreement did exactly the reverse, by disavowing both armed intervention and the use of economic sanctions as means of coercion. 

President Ford started to say, “I can’t under any circumstances believe ... that by signing the agreement ... 35 nations have turned over to the Warsaw Pact nations the domination of Eastern Europe. It just isn’t true!” And that would have been a fine answer to a loaded question. Unfortunately, he went on to add, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.” 

Man, that was a gaffe. President Ford knew exactly what he was talking about, he just said something stupid and then refused to walk it back. (If you watch the clip, you can see him beginning a good recovery, and then blowing it by saying that he did not think that the Poles considered themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.) 

Well, yesterday, Gary Johnson made a much more serious gaffe in an interview on MSNBC. The transcript:

Mike Barnicle asked Johnson: “What would you do if you were elected, about Aleppo?”

“About?” asked Johnson.

“Aleppo,” replied Barnicle.

“And what is Aleppo?” asked Johnson.

“You’re kidding,” responded Barnicle.

“No,” said Johnson.

Uh. That boggles the mind. Stunning. Ford made a gaffe, Johnson just admitted to total political malpractice and disqualifying ignorance. I stand in slack-jawed amazement ... and now I understand why Mitt Romney has refused to endorse. 

Anyone who wanted the Libertarians to become a real third party force in America should be very angry at Gary Johnson right now. As should anyone who believes that running for President of the United States is, you know, a serious thing. 

Jill Stein is a jerk

What, this surprises you? Anti-vaxxer. Devaluing the life of a black child to save an animal. Saying that Hillary threatens nuclear war and is the equivalent of the Fat Crybaby in how immigrants will be treated. (Actually, that last might be true, albeit probably not for the reasons that Stein gave.)

But I wrote this because she is appears to be refusing to endorse ColoradoCare. Why? There is no why! It’s Jill Stein! She has no plan.

I am fascinated by ColoradoCare. It could lead to national single-payer, the way Saskatchewan and Alberta did in Canada. Or it could be a complete disaster. Yet it seems people can barely be bothered to poll. Is it just the weirdness of the national campaign what covering it up?

That was underwhelming

So let me get this straight. Drumpf flies in to Mexico City, goes to Los Pinos. (In a helicopter? I dunno.) Demonstrations against him are a damp squib, although Senator Gabriela Cuevas (PAN-National list) gives a blistering stemwinder that is a pleasure to listen to. Drumpf sings the praises of Mexican-Americans and gently prods President Peña about NAFTA. He could raise a killer point about the way Mexico treats undocumented Central Americans but (wisely) does not. 

Peña joins in the love for Mexican-Americans and says he could work with Trump if elected. They say that they discussed the wall but not who would pay for it. 

Seriously, what the fuck was that? Trump shows that he can control himself, but looks weak as a damned mouse in the late stages of yellow fever. I guess it was sorta kinda good for the Fat Crybaby, as in that any moment where he does not act like an impetuous child is a good one for him, but it is hard to see much of an upside.

I suppose it presages a more soporific Drumpf on the debate stage with Hillary, but who knows? I suppose he is betting that his supporters will turn out to the polls no matter how many crazy campaign promises he drops. 

As for President Peña, well, there is nothing here that will make him more popular at home. And if this meeting does end up helping Fat Crybaby, well, I suspect that the Clinton Administration will remember. Oh, no major ramifications, of course ... but Peña better hope he needs no political cover from north of the border before the 2018 election. 

Welcome to 2016. Have another cigar.

Peña and Drumpf, sitting in the trees

The President of the United Mexican States and the Republican nominee will meet in Los Pinos, the presidential palace, which translates into “the pine trees.” They really will be sitting in the trees. 

No, I have no idea what President Peña is trying to accomplish. The current president of Mexico is not popular; the only way that this meeting will help with that is if he somehow sandbags Trump. But that kind of thing has never been President Peña’s M.O. 

One hypothesis from Andrew Selee at the Woodrow Wilson Center is that President Peña is just trying to “establish channels with whomever might be the next American president” and “from a political perspective, it shows that [Trump] has been forced to change some his rhetoric and take Mexico more seriously.” 

But that can’t be right. One meeting does not open channels; heck, what does “opening channels” even mean? And who believes that the Mexican government has anything to do with recent Trumpista flip-flopping on immigration? Has anyone besides Selee even suggested that? (Well, maybe the people who put up the ad I spotted on Tlalpan Avenue back in May, see picture.) But Mexican officials can read the polls as well as anyone; they know that right now the Crybaby is unlikely to win in November.

The whole thing is weird, unless Peña springs a trap. Watch the news.

Fact of the day: Maine drug arrests

 It appears that Governor LePage has gone off the deep end. Among other things, he said this:

“Let me tell you this, explain to you, I made the comment that black people are trafficking in our state, now ever since I said that comment I’ve been collecting every single drug dealer who has been arrested in our state. ... I don’t ask them to come to Maine and sell their poison, but they come and I will tell you that 90-plus percent of those pictures in my book, and it’s a three-ring binder, are black and Hispanic people from Waterbury, Connecticut, the Bronx and Brooklyn.”

Well! The ACLU, among others, has requested Maine’s arrest records. But it is fairly easy to get the records from 2006. So click the link, go to page 8, and read that of the 5,110 drug arrests made that year in the state a full, wait for it, four percent were black. 

So he was right, only with the races reversed! Most readers can stop now, reblog this, tweet it, move on to other things. For the rest:

To be fair (although, why?) the data are from a decade ago. There has been an explosion in heroin use since then. But somehow, well, while it is remotely possible that Mexican cartel agents are involved in wholesaling, it is unlikely in the extreme that they are involved in retail distribution. Moreover, as of 2013, the number of drug arrests in the state had fallen to 4,359. (Page 28.)

Now, Governor LePage is not up for re-election, but because it is happening in this strange environment with a fat crybaby running as the nominee of one of our major political parties, it seems relevant to tag this post with this. 

I really do need to talk about Alabama. Until I do, go here. 

ColoradoCare

 Speaking of health care, does everyone know that Colorado has single-payer on the ballot this November? 

The big problem is rising health care costs. You can come up with a program that covers its costs now, only to have it fall into the red as those costs continue to increase. I hate to cite Megan McArdle, simply because she likes to say things like, “Not that I'm saying single payer would work well at the federal level, because I don't think it would,” despite, you know, Canada. 

But on this one, she is right: Colorado would be taking a big risk. After all, health care costs are a big part of the Puerto Rican story.

I am not sure how I would vote. I would want to see more about cost control and escalator clauses on the tax bill. Just telling readers that something interesting is afoot out west. 

Alt-stupid

Wow, the alt-right sure came out into the open fast. Like cockroaches from under a rock. One minute, invisible, next one, all over the place. Jesus, what an election.

Anyway, I was drawn to one thing from the Vox explainer. Apparently, Curtis Yarvin liked to cite this description of London in 1876, to show how much better things were back then:

There are, of course, in most great cities, some quarters of evil repute in which assault and robbery are now and again committed. … But any man of average stature and strength may wander about on foot and alone, at any hour of the day or the night, through the greatest of all cities and its suburbs, along the high roads, and through unfrequented country lanes, and never have so much as the thought of danger thrust upon him, unless he goes out of his way to court it.

But how is that not a perfect description of America in 2016?

Anyway, here is a picture of someone of above average stature and strength, wandering through the greatest of all cities, also known as the four-eight in the Bronx. Six murders in 2015, down from 137 in 1990. 

I feel sorry for Yarvin, so consumed by fear and detached from reality. What a terrible way to live. And, to my surprise, it appears that he is not alone.

Has Google captured the Obama administration?

I am in Snoqualmie, Washington, outside Seattle, talking about intellectual property and hanging out with the same GOP-centric establishment crowds I always hang with on the West Coast.

One interesting comment came up in a discussion of whether, when and how to start lobbying the next administration against weakening patent rights: 

“The Clinton donor map and the Obama donor map are similar but not the same. The Clinton map skews south and east, with the hope that the next administration will be less Silicon Valley dominated than this one.” 

This is interesting on three levels. First, the belief that the Obama Administration is in Google’s pocket. Second, the belief that Hillary will not be in Google’s pocket. Third, that donor maps are determinative of political positions, at least on small-bore issues like patent reform.

Are these things true?

(These are Meg Whitman’s peeps. Only one Trump supporter among them.)

If you must argue by anecdote, get them right

Yesterday, Jeff Cox of CNBC published a column called “Donald Trump can win Pennsylvania. Here’s why.” 

He’s right! Donald Trump can win Pennsylvania. We go a lot to Chester County, Pennsylvania, where the exurbs of Philly blend into the part of the state not-affectionately called Pennsyltucky.” The last time I was there, I was flabbergasted to see a motorcycle with a confederate flag hanging off it. (That is my car right next to it in the below photo.) My friend was more than flabbergasted, he was horrified: after all, he lives there with his wife and three children and they aren’t white.

So, yes, obviously Trump can win Pennsylvania. 

But that’s not what Cox wrote. Nope, he wrote, “I think the polls are wrong. How do I know? Because I live in Pennsylvania — have for all my life.” He went on, “Pennsylvania’s jobless rate was 5.6 percent in June, with only 13 other states being worse off in terms of unemployment. So with a sagging economy and a rising crime rate, they look for reasons why they’ve been left behind.” 

So is he right? Does Pennsylvania have a uniquely bad economy or a terrible crime wave?

Well, not really. Unemployment has recently ticked up, but in the context of growing payrolls and rising wages. Things are much better than in November 2012.

Pennsylvania payroll employment:

Pennsylvania unemployment rate:

And what about crime? Well, with the caveat that the UCR is only complete through 2014:

Homicide rates after 2006 come from the first half of the year, for comparability with 2016.

It is certainly true that the Fat Crybaby could take Pennsylvania. I have no issue with what Cox had to say about that. But it won’t be because exogenous measurable conditions in the state have deteriorated since 2012. No, if it happens, it will because something ugly that was already there has been unleashed. Right now, the fundamentals favor the Democrats.

Identity politics

We are all guilty of it. In fact, “identity politics” should be called just politics, period. We all belong to prescriptive or ascriptive groups. Our membership in those groups (whether voluntary, involuntary, or quasi-voluntary) gives us material interests. Sometimes we reject those material interests in favor of the interests of other groups whom we consider more worthy; sometimes we don’t. We always, however, recognize that there are situations where the interests of our favored groups will be sacrificed, or at least attenuated. Maybe we’ll lose a political battle, maybe we’ll accept a banked favor by sacrificing now to get more later. 

Since sometimes we know our favored groups will lose, symbolic actions matter, at least when those action incur political costs to the person who makes them. It is a way of signalling that you will not be forgotten.  “I can’t give you what you want immediately, but I am willing to incur costs to show my support. I am making a down payment on future support for your agenda, if you support me now.”

Which I why that I hope Hillary Clinton does not pick Tim Kaine ... oh, dammit!

Paranoid thoughts

 The fat crybaby has whined that he won’t defend the Baltic States unless, well ...

SANGER: If Russia came over the border into Estonia or Latvia, Lithuania, places that Americans don’t think about all that often, would you come to their immediate military aid?

TRUMP: I don’t want to tell you what I’d do because I don’t want Putin to know what I’d do. I have a serious chance of becoming president and I’m not like Obama, that every time they send some troops into Iraq or anyplace else, he has a news conference to announce it.

SANGER: They are NATO members, and we are treaty-obligated ——

TRUMP: We have many NATO members that aren’t paying their bills.

SANGER: That’s true, but we are treaty-obligated under NATO, forget the bills part.

TRUMP: You can’t forget the bills. They have an obligation to make payments. Many NATO nations are not making payments, are not making what they’re supposed to make. That’s a big thing. You can’t say forget that.

SANGER: My point here is, Can the members of NATO, including the new members in the Baltics, count on the United States to come to their military aid if they were attacked by Russia? And count on us fulfilling our obligations ——

TRUMP: Have they fulfilled their obligations to us? If they fulfill their obligations to us, the answer is yes.

HABERMAN: And if not?

TRUMP: Well, I’m not saying if not. I’m saying, right now there are many countries that have not fulfilled their obligations to us.

Add to this the fact that the only part of the GOP platform that the Trumpistas really fought against was a clause calling for selling weapons to Ukraine. Now, I do not support selling weapons to Ukraine, although I could be convinced. But in light of the above pronouncement, I find it really strange that this was the part of the Republican platform that they went to the mattresses over. 

Hey, to paraphrase the Republican nominee, I’m not saying nothing. People are talking, is all. 

Ted Cruz, American hero? I am actually writing those words ...

 Well, that was an interesting read in the paper this morning! It got me to go to the video. 

As of right now, three things seem clear, at least to me.

1. Fat Crybaby planned to sandbag Senator Cruz. The yelling from the New York delegation was less than spontaneous.
2. Senator Cruz was hoping to rile up the crowd. To see that, you need to watch the video, with the pregnant pauses highlighting the fact that the Senator was not endorsing the nominee. In other words, the New York yelling might have been planned by the nominee, but it was exactly what the Senator was hoping to get.
3. Fat Crybaby lost the battle of convention strategies. The spin is that Senator Cruz martyred himself for constitutional rule.

The mystery is why none of this seems to be reflected in the poll numbers. Hillary is still ahead of the fat crybaby from Queens, but the GOP really does seem to be getting a bounce out of this thing. 

Fat Crybaby from Queens is showing just what a disaster he would be as president. Today, he said that he would ignore NATO:

For example, asked about Russia’s threatening activities that have unnerved the small Baltic States that are among the more recent entrants into NATO, Mr. Trump said that if Russia attacked them, he would decide whether to come to their aid only after reviewing whether those nations “have fulfilled their obligations to us.”

Read the transcript. 

Now note that his mouthpiece, Chris Christie, has stated that President Drumpf would try to end civil service protection and allow businesspeople to serve in government without resigning their positions, let alone putting their assets into a blind trust. 

Gah. Here I am, admiring Senator Cruz for doing the right thing. 

Still not about Brexit

The closed road meant we had to turn off Route 360. The detour took us through Scottsburg, which seemed less a town and more a random collection of rather dispersed but also rather nice houses. No people were out and about, unsurprisingly. We turned down another road, navigating our way around felled branches and trees, when we saw the only sign of the election thus far this trip:

The employees were nowhere to be seen, for reasons we soon discovered.

We got back on Route 360, which took us to our destination: South Boston, Virginia. How could we not stop in Southie? Well, South Boston turns out to be a surprisingly pleasant town. In fact, it seemed almost near perfect for a small town. 

I say surprisingly, because most of the small towns that I have visited in further south, in Alabama and Georgia, have been dumps. They might have been cute once, but the automobile sucked the life out of their centers, quite literally demolishing many of the buildings to make way for parking. In some the outskirts are relatively prosperous, if generic sprawl; but in many the outskirts are also suffering. The strip malls are often filled with a collection of check-cashing places and consignment stores, interspersed with churches and (in South Carolina) adult stores. They are, in general, sobering places to visit. 

Conversely, many small towns in New England (and in some parts of the Midwest) have been gentrified. Their centers are cutesy, often dependent on tourism, students, or upscale exurbanites, with shops catering to that trade. They can be like the worst stereotypes of hipster Brooklyn, only with easier parking. 

But not South Boston! South Boston had hit that sweet spot. The downtown was surrounded by pleasant, well-kept houses and a collection of rather nice church buildings. The downtown itself was vibrant, filled with shops, but real shops catering to ordinary people: insurance agencies, furniture stores, the occasional antique shops, restaurants that were in no way upscale. It wasn’t rich, it wasn’t poor, the car hadn’t sucked the life out of it but it didn’t survive as a preserved bit of fakery for the gentry, either.

For example, here is my compa looking puzzled a store selling what seemed to be an entirely random collection of useful stuff. Very useful stuff, yes, and quite nice, but it still isn’t clear why you would need to have it all in one place.

There were also a lot of storefront churches, including one that was a pleasant surprise. And might explain downtown’s vibrancy, only this was the only sign in Spanish that we saw. 

The streets, however, were spookily deserted. A few parked cars, but very little vehicular and no foot traffic. That was a puzzle, since most of the storefronts were filled. What was going on? 

Well, we were soon to discover why nobody was outside save us ...

White Resentment TV, 24-7?

 From Vanity Fair: “According to several people briefed on the discussions, the presumptive Republican nominee is examining the opportunity presented by the ‘audience’ currently supporting him.”

So imagine a Trump television network and Internet multimedia operation in the wake of a Democratic victory in November. It would, of course, have to out-Fox Fox. It would be dedicated to telling the most dedicated supporters of the presumptive GOP nominee what they want to hear. 24-7 coverage of the themes Fat Crybaby is currently hitting on the stump.

How much damage could that do? The case for “none” is that there will be a backlash to Trumpist nativism after the election; moreover, Fox has already mined those veins for all that they are worth. (Viz its coverage of the New Black Panther Party.) 

The case for “a little” is similar, just assuming that the new venture could move the Overton Window a little bit and might push Fox to become even less hinged. 

The case for “a grave amount” is that it would provide a platform for extreme nativism and abet the creation of large-scale organizations openly dedicated to white identity politics. The Overton Window moves somewhere out to geosynchronous orbit. 

I have no idea.

Orlando is horrifying

 I am in Florida. What happened this weekend horrifies me. I hope all the friends and relatives of the victims can put their lives back together as best as they can. And I hope the State of Florida and the United States of America will take the necessary actions to make it harder for homicidal maniacs to get their hands on the weapons that make such attacks possible. 

The statements of certain politicians have also been (albeit far less) horrifying. (At least as long as said politicians lack power.) All I can add to the debate being conducted in living rooms, bars, social media, television, and among politicians is that America has seen similar cries before ... and we have reacted far worse. Admittedly, the threat during the first Red Scare and World War 2 was far greater. But while one particular fearmongering crybaby has not been earning any respect ... in general, thus far, the reaction of the American public has been good. Even if not all their elected leaders have been profiles in courage, few have openly piled on.

I pray that continues.

An idea to help stop Fat Crybaby

 Just off the top of my head, probably unworkable: a PAC that gives $5,000 or more to any GOP candidate for any office who states that the GOP candidate is not suitable to be President of the United States. No, half-measures (see Portman, Rob, or Szeliga, Kathy) would not count. (Szeliga has, er, trumped Portman, but she still has not come out and said it. I would say that she and Nikki Haley have made ¾-measures. Still not really enough, though.)

Anyway, if some rich people really want to stop Fat Crybaby without hurting the party’s chances, that would be the way to go. There seems to be a real first mover problem.

I still don’t understand Jon Huntsman. Could this really be just a way for him to stick it to Mitt Romney? The fellow who suggested also seems to think it still makes no sense, but I am at a loss to propose alternatives.