A couple of years ago I wrote about a very powerful study that examined the effect of lead poisoning in children on crime rates later in life. It was done by Stephen Billings and Kevin Schnepel, who used data from North Carolina to construct two randomly selected groups of kids, one that received intervention for lead poisoning and one that didn’t. The kids who received intervention to lower their lead levels were far less likely to be arrested for violent crimes when they grew up:
I don’t have any special reason to write about this again except that the final paper has since been published, and a bunch of people pointed it out to me today. In any case, it’s one of the most persuasive studies out there. My original writeup, which has more detail, is here. The paper itself is here.
Every year, James Stimson, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina, updates his public mood index. It’s getting a lot of attention this year because it shows that the public mood is the most liberal it’s been in the entire postwar era:
I’ve added markers to all the midterm election years just before a presidential election where an incumbent was running for reelection. The power of incumbency is strong enough that there’s no clear trend to pick out here, but you can kinda sorta say that Democrats win when the index is above the dashed line and Republicans win when it’s below. But we’re in uncharted territory now. No Republican has ever run for reelection against a public mood this liberal. The two Bushes come the closest, and one lost while the other won (barely).
In other words, this obviously looks promising for a Democratic challenger, but it’s hardly open-and-shut.
That said, I have a couple of questions about this mood index. First, I’m curious about which components of the index are currently trending the most liberal and the most conservative. That data is easily available:
I’m not entirely sure how to interpret all of this. For example, what is a “liberal” mood on the deficit? That it doesn’t matter much? And what’s a “conservative” mood on inflation? That it’s too high? That doesn’t make much sense given the current low inflation rate.
Some of the others are easier to interpret. People are feeling pretty liberal about taxes, which presumably means they’d be OK with raising them, especially on the rich. They’re also feeling pretty liberal about helping schools and ensuring equality of opportunity for all. On the flip side, people are feeling pretty conservative about cutting welfare and cutting the size of government.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. People want to raise taxes on the rich but cut the size of government? They want to ensure equality of opportunity but slash the welfare state? The overall index might be trending historically liberal, but Americans, as usual, are confused and disoriented by the standards of political junkies.
The second question I have is whether this liberal trend is driven by liberals moving to the left or by conservatives (and independents) moving away from the right. Unfortunately, this demographic data isn’t available, which is too bad since it’s an important question. If this mood shift is driven mostly by liberals, it will likely lead to the nomination of a Democrat who is farther to the left than usual and thus farther away from the mainstream (since it hasn’t moved much). If it’s driven by non-liberals, Democrats are likely to nominate an ordinary candidate who will be closer to the mainstream (since it’s moved to the left). The former is obviously good for Donald Trump while the latter is good for liberals. But which is it?
Those of us who are not fashion experts have been puzzled for the past week over the dinner jacket President Trump wore to the state dinner at Buckingham Palace on Monday. Today, we finally have the definitive fashion story from the Daily Mail. Bottom line: Trump’s evening wear was even worse than we thought and the White House tailor wants us to know he had nothing to do with it. Here’s the front page teaser:
The Trump administration has concluded an immigration agreement with Mexico that ends Trump’s threats to levy tariffs on all Mexican goods entering the United States. There are two provisions:
Unless I’m missing something, there’s not much here. The first point is something that Mexico says it’s already been doing for months. American officials initially dismissed it as little more than hot air, but now it’s the heart of the agreement. What changed?
As for the Migrant Protection Protocols, which allow border authorities to return asylum seekers to Mexico while they await a court hearing, they were implemented last December in San Diego, with plans to roll them out across the border over time. So is there anything new here, aside from the fact that Mexico is accepting the program formally, rather than pretending to oppose it while quietly cooperating? I can’t tell. It’s possible that “entire Southern Border” literally means the entire border, not just ports of entry, which I think would be new. But that’s not clear. In any case, this is an American program that Mexico has already tacitly accepted, not anything new that Mexico is doing to rein in the flood of asylum seekers from Guatemala and other countries.
In brief, then: Mexico has agreed to (a) maintain some vaguely defined law enforcement actions and (b) formally accept an American program that they were already cooperating with quietly. That’s it. But it was enough to buy off Trump. He’s a cheap date, I guess.
But Trump doesn’t really care about results anyway. He’ll take to Twitter and describe this agreement as the strongest immigration program ever implemented in history, and the Fox News megaphone will eagerly spread that message to his fans. He only cares that people think he’s the toughest president ever, and I suppose this gets the job done.
They seem unable to attack Trump for his colossal failure in his core campaign pledge. The ads write themselves. Obama kept illegal immigration to consistent lows, using existing law. Trump is presiding over the biggest influx since the very beginning of the millennium, and acting like a panicked autocrat….He has made things even worse by cutting aid to the very countries that are losing their populations to America….His record is a miserable festival of incompetence and sadism, a wide open vulnerability.
I think there’s something to this. I mean, this chart is devastating:
But I think Sullivan goes adrift when he criticizes Democrats for not offering an immigration plan of their own:
This doesn’t mean competing with Trump on xenophobia, cruelty, or bigotry. It means laying out a comprehensive immigration plan that tightens asylum laws so they exclude economic migrants, invests massively in the immigration court system to speed up the process, moves the processing of asylum cases to a foreign country, mandates national e-verify, beefs up the border to wall-like impermeability, and then grants current undocumented immigrants a reprieve. Yes, that’s a big reach — but it has something for everyone, and the problem itself is huge. Elizabeth Warren has a plan for everything — but not this! The working classes don’t seem to matter as much when their wages are suppressed for decades by big corporations exploiting cheap immigrant labor.
Put aside that Sullivan has fallen for the “impermeable wall” silliness. And the fact that American law already excludes economic migrants. And the notion that immigrants suppress native wages. In fact, put aside all the details of what he says. Democrats have offered up comprehensive immigration plans many, many times. Republicans wouldn’t accept them in the Bush era, they wouldn’t accept them in the Obama era, and they won’t accept them now, in the Trump era. Hell, Pelosi and Schumer were ready to give away the store to Trump a year ago, but their proposal went nowhere for the usual reason: Republican leaders are never willing to stand up to their extreme nativist wing. Marco Rubio found that out the hard way.
So there’s really no point to any kind of detailed plan, especially when you’re competing with someone who just bellows “Build the wall!” and then calls it a day. For my money, I’d bellow “Mandatory E-verify!” plus a couple of EZ-to-grasp bullet points about DACA kids and a path to legal work status for current undocumented immigrants—and then call it a day. That’s enough for a campaign. Once President Warren is in office, she can decide if it’s worth trying to cut a more comprehensive deal with Republicans.
The differences between Clinton’s NAFTA—which Trump called the worst trade deal ever—and the Trump-Lighthizer’s USMCA—of which Trump is very, very, very proud indeed: GREATEST TRADE DEAL EVER!! MAKES AMERICA GREAT!!!!—are either (a) trivial, (b) parts of the Trump-nuked Trans-Pacific Partnership, or (c) changes in auto parts rules of origin that are not on the manufacturers’ wish list and are not really on the United Auto Workers’ wish-list either.
How did this happen? Nobody I communicate with has yet managed to figure this out.
Brad, Brad, Brad. This has been Trump’s best strategy from the start: do something trivial and then market the hell out of it. Sure, there’s not much difference between NAFTA and New NAFTA, but there’s not much difference between Tide and New Tide, either. So what? It’s almost an axiom of marketing that success has no correlation with the intrinsic quality of the product being sold.
Even Trump is probably smart enough to know that he can’t actually solve any of the problems he campaigned on. But he doesn’t care. He just needs something, anything, that allows him to claim victory. That’s plenty for his fans, who believe everything he says.
However, this presents us with a different question: if all Trump needs is a little something, why is he actively sabotaging USMCA? He should be doing his best to bulldoze it over the finish line so that he has his little something. But he’s not. Why?
Here is Hopper with one of her garden pals, part of Marian’s vast collection of rabbits large and small that dot our yard. Some are concrete, some are steel, and some are made of a substance I can’t identify. But they are all our little woodland friends.
This is a bit out of left field, but I just wanted to briefly comment on the notion that Medicare for All is a tough sell because it means lots of Americans would have to give up their current coverage, which they love.
Maybe that’s true. But I wonder: how much would it take to teach Americans just how bad their current coverage probably is? What would it take to show them that people in other countries don’t have to worry about huge deductibles? Or gigantic copays. Or surprise billing because someone in the ER turns out not to be part of your insurance network.
People in other countries don’t have to worry about pre-existing conditions. They don’t have to worry about losing their coverage if they lose their job. They don’t have to spend endless hours on the phone trying to convince three or four different bureaucrats that their billing is wrong. Nor do they have to pull their hair out trying to figure out if their insurance company covers their particular illness at all.
American health insurance is great if you’re not sick. Hell, it’s fine if you’re only moderately sick. That describes most people, so most people think their insurance coverage is great. But American health insurance is terrible if you really need it. Oh, it will probably get you the treatment you need, but it’s likely to cost a bundle and will cause you to spend half your life arguing with claims agents over various things that they all say is the other guy’s responsibility.
It doesn’t have to be this way. If Tom Steyer can spend $10 million running ads calling for Trump’s impeachment, can’t some other billionaire decide to run ads telling Americans just how bad their current health coverage really is, and how good it could be if we just did something sensible?
For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon – We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!
Usually I can figure out Trump’s weird tweets by myself. Often they refer to something he was griping about a year or three ago. Or they’re written in Trump code that only longtime Trump-watchers can understand. But sometimes I need some help:
When Trump starts tweeting about a weird thing for no apparent reason…
Left, Fox Business, 12:26 p.m.
Neil Cavuto: NASA is “refocusing on the moon, the next sort of quest, if you will, but didn’t we do this moon thing quite a few decades ago?”
I have no idea what it’s like to be a celebrity of Madonna’s stature, but she sure is touchy. I just read the piece she’s complaining about, and it was a pretty ordinary profile. Yes, it’s titled “Madonna at Sixty,” and yes, the author includes a couple of paragraphs about how Madonna feels at 60—which Madonna turns right around on her: “I think you think about growing old too much. I think you think about age too much. I think you should just stop thinking about it.”
But that’s about it. The rest is pretty normal profile fare, including all the usual detail about stuff like the fabric of Madonna’s curtains. There’s not really very much about Madonna’s age, and there’s plenty about Madonna’s music and her influence. And just about all of it is positive.
I dunno. Maybe I’d feel differently if Vanessa Grigoriadis interviewed me and ended up writing a piece called “A Blogger at Sixty.” Then again, if she treated me with the personal adoration that she treats Madonna, I’d probably forgive her.
POSTSCRIPT: Just for laughs, I googled a few older male musicians. I found loads of “McCartney at 70” stuff, several “Springsteen at 60” pieces, and an absolutely endless pile of “Mick Jagger at ___” profiles.
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