Zombie Trumpcare continues to shamble along:

The Republicans never discuss how good their healthcare bill is, & it will get even better at lunchtime.The Dems scream death as OCare dies!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

It will get even better at lunchtime! Perhaps Trump plans to feed it a yummy vat full of the brains of poor people.

Interestingly, Trump refers to the Republican plan as “their” health care bill. But if “Republicans” aren’t doing the job, maybe Trump himself should explain how good it is. He should feel free to call me anytime if he wants to have a chat. I promise to conduct a fair and in-depth interview about the details of BCRA.

President Trump’s “Election Integrity Commission” wants to collect voter information from the states, but privacy advocates say that the commission has to first complete a privacy impact assessment as required by the E-Government Act. So now they have a new plan:

The plan, more or less, is to have a few people on the White House staff conduct all of the work of the commission in order to help maintain a legal argument that the “sole function” of the commission is to advise the president.

….Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly initially heard arguments in the case more than a week ago….The major dispute before Kollar-Kotelly at this point is over whether and when the E-Government Act’s privacy assessment is required of actions within the White House.

This should make us all rest easy. It’ll just be “a few people” in the Trump White House—whose staff is famous for its Swiss watch precision—collecting everything. What could go wrong?

pointnshoot/flickr

Josh Barro thinks liberals could do a lot better if they were less annoying. He illustrates this with “the hamburger problem”:

Suppose it’s a Sunday in the early fall, and your plan for today is to relax, have a burger, and watch a football game. Conservatives will say, “Go ahead, that sounds like a nice Sunday.”

….But you may find that liberals have a few points of concern they want to raise about what you mistakenly thought was your fundamentally nonpolitical plan for the day. Liberals want you to know that you should eat less meat so as to contribute less to global warming. They’re concerned that your diet is too high in sodium and saturated fat. They’re upset that the beef in your hamburger was factory-farmed.

They think the name of your favorite football team is racist. Or even if you hate the Washington Redskins, they have a long list of other reasons that football is problematic.

I think Barro is off base here. It’s true that liberals are annoying, but they’re mostly annoying (a) to other liberals, not (b) to conservatives. Opinion A is based on personal experience, namely that hanging around other liberals, even virtually speaking, can be exhausting sometimes. There’s always something new you have to be woke about.

Opinion B is based only on what I’ve read about heartland working-class folks, but that’s quite a bit. And their gripes about liberals really don’t seem to revolve around saturated fat, concussions, CAFE standards, or poor working standards in overseas Nike factories. For the most part, they probably haven’t even heard about any of this stuff. You mostly only hear about it in lefty publications, after all.

So that raises a question: what do these heartland working-class folks have against us lefties? Some of it, as Barro suggests, is substantive. If you own guns, you’re not going to like a movement that spends a lot of time trying to regulate gun ownership. If you like football, you don’t want to hear endlessly about brain damage from a lifetime of brutal hits. But what else?

Virtually everything I’ve read about this comes to roughly the same conclusion: they don’t like being treated with contempt. BUT WAIT! WE LEFTIES DON’T TREAT ANYONE WITH CONTEMPT! THAT’S JUST A RIDICULOUS FOX NEWS MEME.

Well…let’s talk about that. Here’s just a teensy little sampling of the kind of thing they hate:

• Awards shows often seem like an endless procession of ribbons and jokes showing off lefty virtues. These mostly revolve around things like gay marriage, the “Muslim ban,” Black Lives Matter, and so forth. To non-lefties, this seems like a heavyhanded and monolithic rejection of their values.
• Lefties mostly believe in evolution. That’s probably OK. But too often, they also treat those who believe in Biblical creation as yahoos. This grates for obvious reasons.
• Trump supporters are often tarred almost wholesale as racists and white supremacists. As it happens, this is no more true of Trump supporters than it is of Romney, McCain, Bush, Dole, or Reagan supporters. But even if it’s true that the Republican base is generally way too tolerant of racist tropes—and it is—nobody who voted for Trump is going to appreciate being called racist.
• How many evangelical Christians do you see on TV? Not a lot. And how many who aren’t portrayed as zealots or hypocrites? Even fewer. That’s an insulting erasure of about a quarter of the population.
• Conservatives and moderates who oppose abortion say that it’s because they believe abortion is murder. A lot of lefties refuse to even take this at face value. They think the “forced birthers” don’t have a principled objection to abortion, they “just hate women” and want to control their sex lives. One again, even if there’s some truth to this, it’s insulting to be written off this way.

You probably have lots of rejoinders to this. Liberals aren’t responsible for what Hollywood does. Trump voters are racists. Conservatives do the same thing to liberals. The real problem is Fox News feeding the outrage machine over every minor slight. Kevin, you’re a hypocrite: you’ve been guilty of this kind of snark yourself. Anyway, why are they so hypersensitive? Don’t they know they control the entire government?

None of that matters. The truth is that when we’re talking about college-educated urban lefties vs. working-class rural conservatives, lefties are the ones with the power. We’re the ones with the skills the modern world wants. We’re the ones with good jobs. We’re the ones who are married and computer savvy and live in nice houses. We’re a powerful group treating a marginalized group with contempt. And as any good lefty knows, that’s nothing at all the same as the other way around.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying liberals started this food fight. I’m not saying that “liberals” are responsible for every last thing that comes out of some lefty’s mouth. I’m not saying I’m free of contempt myself. I’m not even necessarily saying that contempt is a bad idea.

I’m just saying that if you put yourself in their shoes, it’s not that hard to see the contempt from our side that feeds the resentment on their side. And if we keep it up, we have to accept that we’re going to lose their votes—votes that we might win if we disagreed without marginalizing them.

Maybe all of this is worth it in order to keep our base pumped up. But it’s a tradeoff we should make with our eyes open, not by pretending it doesn’t exist.

Bloomberg TV

Um, what?

President Trump held a second, informal meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg earlier this month, according to Ian Bremmer, the president of the international consulting firm Eurasia Group….Trump spoke with the Russian leader for roughly an hour, joined only by Putin’s translator. The meeting had previously gone without mention by the White House.

Two things. First, if Trump were really a decent negotiator, he would have insisted on not even having Putin’s interpreter present. Putin speaks perfectly good English.

Second, what the fuckety fuck fuck? A meeting with only Rex Tillerson present wasn’t enough? Trump had to have another meeting with literally no other American in the room? What does he have to say to Putin that he’s afraid of anyone hearing him say?

Bremmer’s full interview with Charlie Rose about the Trump-Putin meeting is here.

This lovely little flower is a Zauschneria, named after Johann Baptista Josef Zauschner. It’s also known as a California fuchsia or a “hummingbird flower.”

This is a strangely difficult flower to photograph. There are loads of them along my normal morning walk, and I keep taking picture after picture of them. For some reason, though, the pictures always look—what? Kind of cartoony. There’s not much sense of depth, and the petals look like they’ve just been colored in. It’s odd.

But this one turned out pretty well, and I like the framing of the two flowers in the background. However, the real reason I’m putting this up today is that I’m tired of Zauschnerias. I keep taking pictures of them, and I’ll probably keep doing it forever until I post one. Now that I have, I can stop.

Just in case you’re curious, everything that’s happened over the past two months has apparently had zero effect on Donald Trump’s job approval rating:

Based on my experience, supplemented by careful and rigorous record-keeping, I have constructed an equation that describes the amount of emotional energy contained in various forms of impersonal nastiness:

In English: One nasty phone call is the equivalent of 50 nasty emails or 2,500 nasty tweets. Basically, a nasty tweet is all but meaningless. The bandwagon effect is so powerful on weak minds, and the effort required is so minuscule, that an outraged tweet is equivalent to only a tiny fraction of a nasty phone call. Nasty emails are somewhere in between. Keep this in mind if you ever get a barrage of nasty tweets.

There were eight people in Don Jr.’s infamous meeting with a Russian attorney who had promised him “information that would incriminate Hillary” as part of  “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” But so far we only have seven names. Who was the mysterious eighth man? The LA Times has the story today:

Donald Trump Jr.’s controversial meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016 was attended by a California businessman born in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, according to two people familiar with the meeting.

Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze, a 52-year-old businessman from Huntington Beach, was the eighth individual at the controversial meeting, The Times has learned. His identity had not previously been revealed.

….Kaveladze “was asked to attend the meeting purely to … make sure it happened,” said [his attorney]. “He literally had no idea what the meeting was about until he showed up right before.” Kaveladze has been contacted by prosecutors working for special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating possible coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, according to Balber, who said his client was “cooperating fully,” with investigators.

Huh. So Kaveladze was asked to attend to make sure the meeting happened, but had no idea what the meeting was about. I’m not sure that makes sense. In what way did he “make sure” the meeting took place?

All very strange. I suppose Robert Mueller will figure it out in another year or so.

We now have three Republican senators who oppose a clean repeal of Obamacare, so Mitch McConnell’s spiteful parting shot over the failure of Trumpcare is officially dead too. There will be no Republican health care bill for at least the next two years.

The big question now is what Republicans will do instead. They’ve made it clear that what they want to do is sabotage Obamacare so that it will blow up and they can blame Democrats for its failure. They have two main strategies for undermining Obamacare:

• Refuse to pay the CSR subsidies to insurance companies. This amounts to about $8 billion per year, which is used to reduce deductibles and copays for low-income workers. If it goes away, insurance companies will have to make up for it with big premium increases.
• Refuse to enforce the individual mandate. Donald Trump can’t literally remove the mandate from the books, but he can tell the IRS not to enforce it. If that becomes official policy, lots of young, healthy people will forego insurance, knowing that there’s no penalty to pay. This will destabilize insurance pools, which insurance companies will have to make up for by increasing premiums.

These two things will not kill Obamacare. They will not cause a death spiral. They will not cause a mass exodus from the program. In fact, most people won’t even notice anything has happened, since their premiums are capped at a percentage of their income. As premiums go up, their subsidies will go up too, and they won’t pay any more than before.

However, it will hurt middle-class families who make too much money to qualify for subsidies. They’ll see a 20-25 percent increase in their premiums, and they’ll have to pay the whole tab. And that’s after already swallowing a 25 percent premium increase last year.

Are Republicans willing to do this to their middle-class base? Normally I’d say no. That’s crazy. But these are crazy times, and Trump seems to have no qualms about adopting policies that mostly cause pain for his own supporters. “Let Obamacare fail,” he said today. “I’m not going to own it.”

So Republicans might really do it, and then try to lay the blame on Democrats. I don’t think that will work outside of the Fox News bubble, but maybe that’s enough. Stay tuned.

Zaid Jilani of the Intercept points me to an interesting Fed study on the effect of rising university tuition.  The authors make use of the fact that tuition has been rising at different rates in different states, and conclude that rising tuition has no effect on university enrollment. Young people continue to go to college at the same rate as always, and they rack up higher student debt to do it:

I assume this comes as no surprise to anyone. Next they compare tuition increases by state to homeownership rates six years later. Guess what?

As tuition and student debt go up, homeownership rates go down. The authors say that a $1,000 increase in college tuition and fees leads to a 0.24 percentage point decline in the homeownership rate for college students later in life (ages 28 to 30). Thus, the $3,578 increase in tuition from 2001 to 2009 is responsible for a decline of about 0.84 percentage points in homeownership rates among college students from 2009 to 2015. That’s about a tenth of the total decline.

A different analysis suggests the effect may be even bigger: 0.48 percentage points for each $1,000 increase in college tuition. That comes to 2.74 percentage points, which is about a third of the total decline in homeownership rates.

In other words, tuition increases can explain somewhere between a tenth and a third of the decline in homeownership among those with some college education. On net, this may not be a good deal for states:

The results suggest that states that increase college costs for current student cohorts can expect to see a response not through a decline in workforce skills, but instead through weaker spending and wealth accumulation among young consumers in the years to come….These states, on average, can expect both weaker starter housing markets and more “boomeranging” adult children to follow. The evidence points to a final policy opportunity to stimulate youth homeownership over the long run: funding state higher education.

I suppose the next step would be to take these estimates and plug them into a model that projects state economic growth and tax receipts. That would tell us, on net, if tuition increases help or hurt state and local budgets.