Here’s the latest in capitalism:

Qualcomm Inc. rejected Broadcom Ltd.’s unsolicited $105 billion offer, setting up a potentially hostile showdown between two giants of the chip industry over what would be the biggest technology takeover ever….In a statement Monday, Qualcomm’s board said the offer, which Broadcom submitted last week, dramatically undervalues the company and comes with significant regulatory uncertainty.

For the past year, until Broadcom made its offer, Qualcomm’s market cap has been around $80-85 billion. Anybody could come in off the street and buy Qualcomm stock that valued the company at that price. But if someone offers to buy all the Qualcomm stock at that price, suddenly capitalism has gone bonkers and the price signal of the market is off base by 30 or 40 percent.

Company boards routinely reject offers like this, and to the extent that it’s just a negotiating tactic I suppose no harm is done. But all too often it’s sincere. Management doesn’t like the idea of losing their prestigious jobs and the board goes along, so they propagate the fiction that their company is really worth a lot more than the market says it is. If it were put to a vote of stockholders, I wonder how many would agree? If it were me, I’d pocket the immediate gain and then invest it somewhere else. Why wait?

Worldwide Speakers Group

I had totally forgotten that Tom Price was forced to resign as secretary of HHS because he spent over a million dollars of taxpayer money on private charters and military jets. That means we need a new one. But who?

President Trump nominated a pharmaceutical executive to be the next secretary of the Health and Human Services Department. The nominee, Alex M. Azar II, served as a deputy at the department under former President George W. Bush. Until January, he was the head of the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly’s United States division.

Mr. Trump made his announcement in a Twitter post while traveling in Asia. Mr. Trump said Mr. Azar would be “a star for better healthcare and lower drug prices!”

I suppose I didn’t have to ask. Of course it was some wealthy Big Pharma guy. Who else would be a champion for lower drug prices, after all?

Look, I really need that all-purpose response to Trump that I asked for in the last post. Let’s get on this, shall we?

I have a reason for posting this:

Trump on his Asia trip: “It was red carpet like nobody, I think, has probably ever received. And that really is a sign of respect, perhaps for me a little bit, but really for our county. And I’m really proud of that.” h/t @colvinj

— Ken Thomas (@KThomasDC) November 13, 2017

Here’s the reason: I want to know the proper reaction to stuff like this. It happens a lot in the Trump era, and my natural response almost invariably includes bad language. My go-tos are things like Jesus Christ, Jesus fucking Christ, for fuck’s sake, what the fuck, and so forth. However, I don’t really want to fill up the blog with language that offends some people, so I need an alternative.

But what? Abbreviations are one possibility, but not everyone understands them. “What an idiot” or somesuch does the job, but doesn’t really pack the punch that Trump requires. Old-timey euphemisms are obviously out, since this isn’t a joke.

Any ideas?

There’s no special reason for posting this except that taxes and tax cuts are in the news:

For more than 60 years, total federal taxes have averaged about 17 percent of GDP.¹ Tax receipts go up and down slightly, mostly because of tax legislation and economic cycles, but always return pretty quickly to their long-term average. Spending has averaged about 20 percent of GDP ever since the Reagan era. It also goes up and down a bit thanks to recessions and expansions, but always returns to around 20 percent.

Bottom line: Taxes have not skyrocketed. Spending has not skyrocketed. Corporations are not burdened with the highest tax rate on the planet.

¹Of that total, personal income taxes have been a steady 8 percent of GDP. Corporate taxes have declined from 5 percent of GDP to 2 percent.

David Atkins:

Yesterday I wrote that Roy Moore’s behavior was in keeping with hardcore conservative evangelical culture of sanctioned patriarchal sexual abuse. I have also stated that the release of the Access Hollywood tape almost certainly actually helped Trump with some evangelicals because, despite being a philandering adulterer, Trump established a more fundamental cultural rapport with their moral value system….These are admittedly controversial positions. But they’re also hard to refute after today’s polling shows that 37% of Alabama evangelicals are actually more likely to vote for Roy Moore after hearing the allegations against him, and 34 percent said it would make no difference.

FWIW, I think there’s a pretty good alternate explanation: 37 percent of Alabama evangelicals think the allegations are an obviously fake political attack designed to smear a conservative candidate. The fact that liberals are scared enough of Moore to mount an attack like this just shows how effective he is—and thus even more worth supporting.

It’s worth keeping in mind that vanishingly few Alabama evangelicals have read the Washington Post story. They’ve seen summaries in their local newspaper. They’ve seen Fox News coverage emphasizing that it all happened 40 years ago and was “just dating” of 17-year-olds. They’ve heard from local Republican leaders that it’s all an invention. They’ve listened to talk radio that’s dismissed the whole thing as a liberal hoax. And they’re primed to believe all this because they really don’t want to vote for the Democratic fellow anyway.

Just my two cents. The patriarchal culture of evangelicals may play a role too, but I suspect that distrust of liberals and the liberal media probably plays a much bigger one.

This chart illustrates a mystery:

Because of special formulation requirements, California gasoline is always more expensive than gasoline in the rest of the country. As you can see, from 2010 through 2015 it averaged about 36 cents more per gallon.

In February 2016, an explosion at a refinery in Torrance took 10 percent of California’s capacity offline. As you’d expect, prices spiked: the California premium went up to about 76 cents above the national average.

But when the Torrance refinery came back online, a funny thing happened: prices came down, but not to their previous level. For some reason, California gasoline now costs about 57 cents more than the national average. Here is Michael Hiltzik in the LA Times:

Estimates of the size of the mysterious premium in prices per gallon being collected by the state’s refineries range from at least 20 cents per gallon — as calculated by UC Berkeley energy economist Severin Borenstein — to more than 30 cents, as reckoned by the advocacy group Consumer Watchdog.

….Soon after the Torrance explosion, the California Energy Commission asked its Petroleum Market Advisory Committee to analyze the event’s price impacts….The report mentioned an “unexplained differential” between prices in California and the national average that persisted even when the unique features of the state’s gasoline market were subtracted….Californians appeared to have paid an extra $12 billion at least since the 2015 Torrance explosion.

….The Petroleum Market Advisory Committee didn’t assert that there was anything illegal about the persistently high gas prices after the Torrance explosion. But it was convinced that the extra money was going to the refineries, because their margins — that is, the difference between their cost for crude oil and the wholesale price they charge for gasoline, had “remained elevated for an unexpectedly long time” after the explosion.

The refinery lobby claims the increased premium is just due to market forces, “as well as our state being a fuel ‘island,’ without pipelines bringing refined petroleum products into California.” Not everyone agrees:

Consumer Watchdog contends that another factor is a lack of refinery competition. Four companies — Chevron, Tesoro, Phillips 66 and Valero — control a combined 78% of statewide refining capacity; Chevron and Tesoro alone control more than half of all capacity. That may make it easier for refiners to tighten production at will, driving costs higher, as consumer advocates warned in 2013, when then-Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris approved the sale of BP’s Carson refinery to Tesoro. (Harris maintained that conditions she imposed on the sale would protect consumers from price pressures.)

And that’s where things stand. Refineries appear to have pocketed $12 billion in extra profits thanks to the Torrance refinery explosion. But the refinery lobby says there’s nothing to see here: it’s just capitalism at work. And nobody in the California government seems to care much about investigating further. As Hiltzik points out, this is odd considering the fuss being kicked up over California’s 12-cent increase in the gasoline tax, which will finance repairs to roads and bridges. If that’s such a big deal, why is it that nobody seems to care about a 20-30 cent price hike going straight into the refinery industry’s pocket?

I don’t know Carl Preston. He’s just a name in a cemetery. But I learned a little bit about him.

He was born Walter Carl Preston on December 10th, 1897, in Oklahoma. His mother was named Rose and his father, George, was a farmer. He had one sister, Grace, and five brothers: Ray, Earl, Ralph, Lyle and Robert. He grew up in Oklahoma but dropped out of high school after his sophomore year. When he was 19 he moved to Stockton, where he worked for a cousin as a dairyman. His draft registration says he had blue eyes and brown hair. He drove a truck during World War I.

After the war he settled in Los Angeles. In 1920 he married Catherine Klages and had two children: Kathleen and Richard. He owned a modest home and made his living driving a truck for a street construction company. During the Depression he worked for the WPA for a couple of years, and after that continued driving a truck for the rest of his life. He died on June 5th, 1964. He was a veteran.

From a former deputy DA who worked alongside Roy Moore:

It was common knowledge that Roy dated high school girls, everyone we knew thought it was weird…We wondered why someone his age would hang out at high school football games and the mall.

Okey dokey.

I keep seeing stuff like this:

If Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee [for Alabama’s open Senate seat], wins next month, Mr. McConnell’s majority will shrink to one, possibly imperiling the Republican push to overhaul the tax code and most everything else that lawmakers are aiming to do to reverse their spiral before the midterm elections.

If Jones wins, the Republican majority will indeed be reduced to 51-49. But that hardly matters. The tax bill needs 60 votes to pass.

Republicans wrote reconciliation instructions allowing the tax bill to create a deficit of $1.5 trillion in its first ten years. But Senate rules still require the bill to be deficit neutral after the ten-year window. It’s not. It’s not even close. Here is Congress’ own estimate of the deficits produced by the Republican bill:

It’s obvious that these deficits aren’t going to suddenly stop in 2028. That means the tax plan isn’t deficit-neutral after the ten-year window, and that means Republicans will need 60 votes to overcome a Democratic filibuster. As far as I know, there are only two other options:

• Make the tax bill temporary and have it expire in 2028. That’s what George Bush did. But Republicans have said they don’t plan to do this, and making a business tax overhaul temporary is nuts anyway.
• Ignore the official estimates and simply declare the bill deficit neutral. However, this is tantamount to killing the filibuster: if the Senate can ignore CBO and JCT estimates, they can ignore the Senate parliamentarian too. That means future Senates can pass reconciliation instructions for pretty much anything and pass them with a simple majority.

The Capitol Hill press corps needs to push back on this and ask Republicans blunter questions about their plan. Do they think they can round up eight Democratic votes? Do they plan to have the bill expire in 2028? Are they prepared to override CBO and JCT deficit estimates? Do they plan to outright kill the filibuster? If not, then what are they up to?

Trigger warning: Watching this video might make you ill.

Roy Moore met by GOP cheers just outside Birmingham in first public appearance since allegations: pic.twitter.com/OWELn5TCa8

— Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) November 11, 2017

So what is the Republican Party going to do about its Roy Moore problem?

Republican senators and their advisers, in a flurry of phone calls, emails and text messages, discussed fielding a write-in candidate, pushing Alabama’s governor to delay the Dec. 12 special election or even not seating Mr. Moore at all should he be elected….State law gives the governor broad authority to set the date of special elections….Ms. Ivey’s advisers have not ruled out exercising that power again, according to Republicans in touch with her camp, but she has signaled that she would like reassurances of support from the White House before taking such an aggressive step.

Is this serious? They’re thinking about postponing the election not because of a natural disaster or because someone died or anything like that. They’re thinking about doing it for openly partisan reasons: their candidate has turned out to be a disgusting creep who’s likely to lose, so they want a do-over. I wonder how long it will be before we get a tweet from Donald Trump declaring that this is the fair thing to do “until we get to the bottom of whether this is fake news”?