On average, Americans pay about $11,000 annually for health care. That’s more than double the amount paid in France, widely considered to have one of the best health care systems in the world. This means that every year, a family of four pays about $23,000 more for health care than the same family in France.

Much of this cost is hidden in the form of Medicare taxes and payments by corporations for private health insurance. In the end, though, it all comes out of the paychecks of working Americans. It’s a hell of a tax to pay just for the privilege of being able to say that we allow health care providers to charge anything they want without government interference.

White House chief of staff John Kelly was at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in 2018 to commemorate the end of World War I, but Donald Trump wasn't. He didn't want to risk getting his hair wet.White House/ZUMA

Jeffrey Goldberg has a stunning story today about President Trump’s attitude toward the military. In a nutshell, he’s contemptuous of anyone who served, anyone who was captured on the battlefield, or anyone who died. Goldberg’s piece starts with a description of Trump’s canceled visit to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018:

In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

…According to sources with knowledge of the president’s views, he seems to genuinely not understand why Americans treat former prisoners of war with respect. Nor does he understand why pilots who are shot down in combat are honored by the military.

…On Memorial Day 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery, a short drive from the White House. He was accompanied on this visit by John Kelly, who was then the secretary of homeland security….Trump was meant, on this visit, to join John Kelly in paying respects at his son’s grave, and to comfort the families of other fallen service members. But according to sources with knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.

I think Stalin had approximately the same view of the soldiers under his command. But then again, Stalin was a psychopath.

This may look like some kind of hobbit village, but it’s actually a part of Aldrich Park, which in turn is a part of the UC Irvine campus. The entire park is about a thousand feet across and is named after UCI’s first chancellor, Daniel Aldrich, who came up with the original idea of designing the campus as a ring surrounding a circular park. The campus has since expanded vastly beyond that original ring, but Aldrich Park remains. It is now home to five disc golf courses (white, red, green, black, and blue).

For the past several weeks Donald Trump has been trying to whip his base into a frenzy over all the “Democrat run” cities that are going up in flames. This is generally viewed as part of his law-and-order campaign spiel, with a side order of racial dog whistling, but it seems a little quixotic since, at most, he can only point to Portland and Kenosha as cities that are currently having problems with violent protesters. That’s a mighty thin thread for a claim that all of America’s big cities are in trouble, and it’s no surprise that it doesn’t seem to be working.

But before you write it off as a failed strategy, it’s worth remembering something else about America’s cities. This chart showing employment trends broken up across US regions is from a McKinsey report, but you can find similar ones in a hundred other places:

This should be pretty familiar to everyone: Big cities are home to the lion’s share of job growth, and are where all the job growth is projected to be in the future. Conversely, rural areas are losing jobs.

In one sense this is a purely economic observation. But it also represents something else: envy. The people who live and work in rural America can see perfectly well that cities are booming while their own communities are barely treading water. But nobody likes to think that their community is literally the dregs of the nation. There must be something that’s better about living where they live.

This is what Trump is appealing to. Look, he says, maybe folks in big cities make more money than you, but these cities are awash in crime and violence. That’s the price they pay, and that’s why it makes sense to stay where you are. In fact, it’s damn smart of you, he suggests, to avoid the cesspools of New York, Chicago, and other crime-ridden metropolises.

Well. That’s good to hear, isn’t it? Folks who live in small towns and rural areas are smart to stay where they are. It’s not at all a matter of not having the right skills or not having the energy to move. It’s just a simple, rational decision to trade off money for safety.

Even if Trump’s law-and-order schtick doesn’t end up doing much for him, it’s already had the side benefit of binding rural and small town voters closer to him. He’s explained to them why they’re smart to live where they live, and they like that. Naturally, they also like the person who explained it.

The Congressional Budget Office issued a report this week warning that federal debt would soon be higher than our annual GDP:

There’s no need to worry about this, though. Joe Biden looks like a good bet to win the presidential election, and if he does then the federal deficit will once again become our nation’s single biggest problem on November 4th. Republicans are pretty reliable on this score.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through August 31. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

This is yet another lovely picture from Slot Canyon X in Arizona. At the top left you can see an outline of . . . Groot? Something else? As usual, put your best guess in comments.

Among the United States and its peer countries in Europe, deaths from COVID-19 began to decline in April and May as the effects of new social distancing rules started to rein in the spread of the virus. In Europe, that decline continued through July until deaths hit nearly zero.

In the US, however, President Trump urged states to re-open their economies in mid-May, and by mid-June the decline in mortality stopped. Mortality increased in July and August, and then began to decline very slowly in mid-August. Our death rate is currently 2.7 per million, compared to an average of about 0.1 per million throughout Europe. If the US had followed Europe’s lead, our total COVID-19 deaths would be about 30 per day instead of the 1,000 per day we’re currently experiencing.

In the New York Times today, Harvard professor Michael Sandel hits on one of my hobby horses: the widespread contempt of the educated for the less-educated.

Building a politics around the idea that a college degree is a precondition for dignified work and social esteem has a corrosive effect on democratic life. It devalues the contributions of those without a diploma, fuels prejudice against less-educated members of society, effectively excludes most working people from elective government and provokes political backlash.

…It is important to remember that most Americans—nearly two-thirds—do not have a four-year college degree….In the United States and Europe, disdain for the less educated is more pronounced, or at least more readily acknowledged, than prejudice against other disfavored groups. In a series of surveys conducted in the United States, Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium, a team of social psychologists led by Toon Kuppens found that college-educated respondents had more bias against less-educated people than they did against other disfavored groups. The researchers surveyed attitudes toward a range of people who are typically victims of discrimination. In Europe, this list included Muslims and people who are poor, obese, blind and less educated; in the United States, the list also included African-Americans and the working class. Of all these groups, the poorly educated were disliked most of all.

Beyond revealing the disparaging views that college-educated elites have of less-educated people, the study also found that elites are unembarrassed by this prejudice. They may denounce racism and sexism, but they are unapologetic about their negative attitudes toward the less educated.

Both liberals and conservatives share this prejudice, but there’s a difference. Conservatives can be publicly deferential toward the less-educated (“I love the poorly educated,” Donald Trump said after winning their votes in the 2016 primaries) but behind the scenes they treat them as marks in a long con. Liberals, by contrast, all too often write them off. When they do, their attitude seems to be that if people are stupid enough to vote for Trump, then screw them.

I know from experience that liberals will deny this. I also know that even as they deny it, my comment section will immediately fill up with disdainful comments about the less-educated. This is, obviously, self defeating at a political level, but more than that it’s antithetical to the entire liberal project. We’re supposed to be the ones who look out for the less fortunate, and the less educated certainly fill that bill, more so today than ever.

I wince every time I see this on Twitter or Facebook or in more personal forums. Sometimes it’s explicit, other times it takes subtler forms. Either way, it should stop. It demeans us all.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through August 31. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

But before we get to that, something else first. Deaths from COVID-19 are close to zero throughout Europe, but over the past few weeks there’s been a worrisome surge in cases. The biggest surge is in Spain, which is also seeing a rise in mortality, followed by France—which, oddly, isn’t, even after six weeks of rising cases. Italy’s case count is also on the rise, though at a lower pace.

It’s hard not to draw a grim conclusion from this: nearly any loosening of social distancing rules, even in places where the virus has been crushed, will lead to an outbreak of new cases. And if there’s an outbreak of new cases, eventually there will be an outbreak of new deaths too.