Sunday, October 13, 2024

In reality, the US economy in October 2024 is great. Will enough voters believe that?

One of the most infuriating things in this election cycle is the flat-out BS that Republicans and too many American voters believe when it comes to the state of the American economy. By any objective measure, we are in a great situation, and yet GOPs are trying to convince people that it's all bad and that all of the good things that are happening in the Real America aren't happening.

Heather Long of the Washington Post penned a recent editorial taking issue with that, and said that if facts matter, Americans should be very happy with the country's economy.

Polarization in the United States makes it difficult to talk about any truth, even about the economy. Last Friday’s jobs report surpassed all expectations. As soon as it came out, Republicans such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida tried calling it fake. In reality, even if the report is later revised down, it will still show an economy that is humming along. And consider the bigger picture: The United States has nearly 7 million more jobs than it did before the pandemic, and the largest share of 25-to-54-year-olds working since 2001. Many experts didn’t think it even possible for the labor market to become this robust again. Some theories considered Americans too addicted to video games or drugs, or simply too lazy to work. The jobs rebound has proved the experts wrong.

The story on inflation is similar. Two years ago, economists were predicting a recession. Many said it was impossible to lower inflation without a downturn and widespread job losses. Yet we are living through this miracle. Report after report shows inflation cooling off. On Thursday, we learned that inflation has cooled to 2.4 percent. It’s so close to the 2 percent target again even Federal Reserve officials aren’t that worried about it anymore. And there is no recession in sight.
Long also notes that for all the talk of the stress that past price hikes have caused, Americans' wage gains have generally been larger than price increases, especially among those on the lower end of the wage scale.

Overall, inflation-adjusted hourly wages are more than 2% higher than they were at the end of 2019 (aka pre-COVID), and are nearly 3% higher than they were at inflation's peak of June 2022. And yet Republicans are insisting that things are no better than they were 2 years ago, if you listen to the (rapidly-dwindling) economic-based ads that they run.

Long admits that your mileage may vary depending on your personal circumstance and the housing costs in your neighborhood. But whatever stresses exist have not held back everyday Americans from spending money at a rate that is well above the amount of price increases that may have existed. And now borrowing costs are heading down for those who may have been hurt from the higher interest rates of the last 2 years.
This doesn’t mean all is perfect. The third of American households that rent their homes have faced painful increases, and many have lost hope that they will ever be able to buy a home. And although the job market is robust, hiring has slowed. Younger Americans are struggling to get jobs, especially in white-collar industries. The manufacturing sector has also been in an slump lately. (The Fed rate cuts should help alleviate some of this pain.)

Nevertheless, the economy is excelling on many fronts, much as it did in the late 1990s. And polls show that Americans are beginning to notice. JPMorgan’s chief global strategist, David Kelly, has pointed out that the “misery index” (a combination of the inflation and unemployment rates) has dropped lower than it has been 89 percent of the time in the past half-century. The best metric to watch is consumer spending. Even as Americans tell pollsters they are gloomy, they keep on spending — especially on eating out, visits to amusement parks and pumpkin patches, and tickets to concerts and sports events. This is yet another signal of a healthy economy.
In addition, I'd mention that recent revisions from the Bureau of Economic Analysis shows that Americans had significantly higher incomes than first reported, and as a result, personal savings rates have been near or slight;ly above 5% of income for the last 18 months, which isn't much different than they were in the late 2010s.

I also note this interesting release from the Biden Administration's Council of Economic Advisors, who say that the higher wages for typical American workers translates into groceries being more affordable now than they were in much of the Trump years.

Which again illustrates a central question in this election. Do American voters believe in the reality that Republicans are trying to convince them of, or do they believe the one that exists in the outside world? And it's amazing and discouraging that we don't have a definitive answer for that question. I have optimism that Real Reality wins out (which means that Dems will win out in 23 days), but I can't guarantee it yet.
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Saturday, October 12, 2024

Inflation watch? Other than eggs and fruits, not much to worry about.

After a few months of good news on the inflation front, and with the Federal Reserve beginning to cut rates from multi-year highs, this week gave us a chance to see if the momentum continued in September with the release of new a new report on the Consumer Price Index.

A 0.3% increase in "core" inflation (i.e., without food or energy) isn’t great, but it was nice to see the rise in shelter to only be 0.2% for the second time in 4 months. It was rises in clothing (+1.1%), medical services (+0.7%) and transportation services (+1.4%) that got the overall core index higher than expected.

That’s not a big deal in the overall picture, but something I did notice was the 0.4% increase in food at home (generally groceries), which is the biggest 1-month jump in that category since companies re-set their prices for 2024 in January. And 2/3 of that increase in groceries came down to 2 items.

Eggs +8.4%
Fresh fruits +2.2%

Most everything else was tepid when it came to price increases, so that feels like things are still generally under control.

But what’s up with those egg prices, which are now up nearly 40% in the last year?
More than 100 million “wild aquatic birds, commercial poultry and backyard or hobbyist flocks” have been infected with bird flu since January 2022, according to the CDC.

Prices have spiked in recent weeks due to a large bird flu outbreak at two Colorado chicken farms in July. That, paired with higher consumer demand, is contributing to the sticker shock many Americans may be experiencing in the aisles, experts say.

More than 50 million birds died in the 2014-2015 outbreak, while more than 100 million birds have died since the outbreak that started in 2022. It has become the most deadly HPAI outbreak in history.

Amy Hagerman, an associate professor of agricultural economics at Oklahoma State University, says table egg-laying chickens seem particularly susceptible to HPAI, likely because the virus can spread quickly in their close quarters.

“Table egg-layer facilities tend to be very large, and so you can lose a million or 2 million birds on a single facility, because this is a highly contagious virus,” she says.
So the price spike in eggs isn’t anything that relates to economic policy here, unless you want more sick chickens and your store’s eggs becoming more (shall we say) high-risk?

Other good news is that September's increase in average hourly wages beat the CPI for the 5th straight month, and is up by 1.5% vs inflation on a year-over-year basis.

I also remembered Fed officials mentioning that a tepid reading for August in the Producer Price Index was a big reason why what they chose a larger interest rate cut last month. So let’s see what the newest PPI report portends for future inflation.
The Producer Price Index for final demand was unchanged in September, seasonally adjusted, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Final demand prices advanced 0.2 percent in August and were unchanged in July. On an unadjusted basis, the index for final demand rose 1.8 percent for the 12 months ended in September.

Within final demand in September, a 0.2-percent increase in the index for final demand services offset a 0.2-percent decline in prices for final demand goods.

The index for final demand less foods, energy, and trade services inched up 0.1 percent in September after rising 0.2 percent in August. For the 12 months ended in September, prices for final demand less foods, energy, and trade services increased 3.2 percent.
Not bad, and when you look further up the chain, the three steps closest to the source all had price drops in September.

The only item in that PPI report that worries me is the 1.0% increase in the final demand stage for foods. Much like the CPI report, this seems to be heavily concentrated into few areas - fresh fruits (+8.3%), processed chickens (+9.9%), grains (+4.8%), and dairy products (+1.5%). I also note that while eggs had a PPI decline of -6.2% in September, but that's little comfort after a 56% increase in June and 55% increase in August.

But overall, I don’t see widespread inflation firing back up over the coming months, because most other sectors are seeing flat or even declining prices. Well, outside of profiteering or other manipulations, of course.

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Thursday, October 10, 2024

Yes, there's FEMA money for disasters now. May need more soon, but they are helping today

With the one-two punch of hurricanes Helene and Milton in recent weeks, we've seen Republicans try to claim that there isn't enough aid to pay for the recovery efforts of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), or that somehow the aid is being misdirected away from helping people in the stricken areas. Which is why this recent tweet from FOX NEWS' top correspondent on Capitol Hill was worth noting.

Repeat - Disaster Relief Funds go to RELIEF FROM DECLARED DISASTERS. It is not diverted to deal with services related to migrants.

In addition to that memo, there was a report to Congress on October 3rd discussing the availability of funds related to Hurricane Helene. And it said there are billions of disaster relief available right now.
While it is not the only source of federal funding for disaster assistance, FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund (DRF) is the primary funding source for federal government response and recovery activities. As a result, its level of unobligated funds is often used as shorthand for the overall availability of federal resources for response and recovery.

On August 7, 2024, prior to the development of Hurricane Helene, FEMA announced the implementation of immediate needs funding (INF) restrictions, as a result of the unobligated balance in the DRF for major disasters being at risk of depletion before the end of FY2024. INF slows obligations for long-term recovery and mitigation projects in favor of preserving resources for response and recovery activities. This action has delayed $8 billion in obligations as of mid-September 2024. Although annual appropriations have not been enacted for FEMA as of the date on this Insight, on September 27, 2024, President Biden signed into law a continuing resolution that would provide $20.26 billion in temporary budget authority for the DRF, available October 1. These funds would be available until December 20, 2024, or until FEMA’s annual appropriations are enacted, whichever comes first.
Now, maybe we need more funds than that to take care of the large amount of damage and disruption from Helene and Milton over the coming weeks. But there is money that can be used for assistance individuals and communities, and FEMA's top administrator told Chris Hayes last night that they were hard at work to get that help out as best they can, both in Florida and in North Carolina, and reiterated there was enough money in the accounts to pay for efforts at this time.

I also want to point out that Congress gets a Disaster Relief Fund monthly report, the most recent of which came out on Wednesday. And it shows the $20.26 billion in base budget for major disaster assistance via FEMA, and there is also $1.974 billion carried over from the 2024 Fiscal Year, which ended on September 30.

Some of those funds are intended to pay for disaster assistance and administration that has already been set aside, including COVID aids and Puerto Rico’s continued rebuilding from Hurricane Maria). But most of it can be used right now for help, and there will be more to come once Congress passes a bill to pay for it (well, there BETTER be a bill that pays to rebuild from these hurricanes).

It is gross that Republicans and Twitter trolls are claiming that FEMA does not have funding to perform Disaster Relief operations at this time, and anyone that has said so in the last 7 days IS LYING. There is no "buts" about that. THEY ARE LYING.
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Tuesday, October 8, 2024

2024's final budget deficit ends at $1.8 trillion. Does it matter?

On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office released their monthly US budget information statement for September. Which means that this report also gave the full-year total for the budget, and we got to see what the total deficit was.
The federal budget deficit was $1.8 trillion in fiscal year 2024, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. The estimated deficit for 2024 was $139 billion more than the shortfall recorded during fiscal year 2023. Revenues increased by an estimated $479 billion (or 11 percent). Revenues in all major categories, but notably individual income taxes, were greater than they were in fiscal year 2023. Outlays rose by an estimated $617 billion (or 10 percent).
To be exact, the CBO says the budget deficit for Fiscal Year 2024 ended up being $1.834 trillion. On the positive side, this was $81 billion less than what was projected by the CBO in June, and the CBO points out that if it wasn't for SCOTUS cancelling some canceled student loan debt, the deficit would have gone down in FY 2024.
[2023]’s deficit of $1.7 trillion would have been larger if not for the recording of budgetary effects related to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a plan the Administration announced in 2022 to cancel many borrowers’ outstanding student loans. If those effects, and the effects of timing shifts, were excluded for fiscal year 2023, the deficit for that year would have been $2.0 trillion instead of $1.7 trillion. Thus, without the savings related to the unwinding of the proposed debt cancellation (and excluding the effects of timing shifts), CBO estimates that the federal deficit would have been lower by $110 billion in 2024 than it was in 2023.
The current deficit is also well below the $3.0 trillion+ what we had during the pandemic-wracked 2020 Fiscal Year, which included massive increases in aids in pretty much every direction, and a lack of revenues as unemployment spiked in March and April of that year. But the deficit is also quite a bit more than what was projected in late 2020 (mostly due to the Biden Administration's stimulus measures), and is even above what was expected in Spring 2023.

Some of that increase in the deficit for 2024 was due to a $240 billion jump in interest costs on the US debt, which reflects the large increase in interest rates from the Federal Reserve in 2022 and 2023.

But I'll also note there was a significant drop in tax revenues in Fiscal Year 2023. This seems to be related to 2022's losses in the stock market (which have now long-recovered), and because of after-effects of 2022's inflation, as Social Security benefits had a large increase in 2023, and there was also a back-door tax break in 2023 as the tax brackets re-set at significantly higher income levels as an indexing to that inflation.

On the spending side, the cancellation of the student loan cancellation was a little less than half of the increase in spending.
Outlays in fiscal year 2024 were $6.8 trillion, CBO estimates—$617 billion (or 10 percent) more than in fiscal year 2023. Total outlays through fiscal year 2024, were about $50 billion (or less than 1 percent) less than CBO projected in June. If not for the timing shifts discussed above, outlays in fiscal year 2024 would have been $699 billion (or 11 percent) greater than in 2023. The discussion below reflects adjustments to exclude the effects of those timing shifts.

If the 2024 savings related to the unwinding of the proposed cancellation of student loans...and the effects of timing shifts are excluded, CBO estimates that outlays in 2024 would have been $369 billion (or 6 percent), greater than during the same period last fiscal year.
The $240 billion increase in interest costs on the US debt accounted for much of the rest of the added spending, along with a $107 billion increase in Social Security benefits and $78 billion in additional Medicare costs.

I still don't see the deficit as a major economic problem. The US dollar index is quite a bit stronger than it was in 2020, and has been relatively steady since the start of 2023, trading in a small range. And inflation has settled back toward 2019 rates even as the deficit is twice the level that it was back then (which also illustrates that much of the "inflation" was related to the big jump in profits over those 5 years).

But if you don't like the high negative numbers of our budget balance, I would suggest that a return to higher tax rates on the rich and corporate could help to bring that number down starting next year. And maybe bring down some of that greedflation in the process!
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Sunday, October 6, 2024

Those hateful and stupid GOP ads wrecking your sports-watching experience? It's by design

In a typical October, a full day of college football and MLB playoffs on Saturday is a fun time. But because we are in "swing-state Wisconsin" in an election year, it also means the commerical breaks are filled with political ads. And especially filled with absurd and insulting Republican ads.

I know the point is to be as disgusting as possible and there's no sense in overthinking it, but the transphobic Trump ad airing during the baseball game is a decent metaphor for the broader goals of the movement. Just smearing their shit over every other thing, making it uglier and more like them.

— David_j_roth (@davidjroth.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 4:05 PM

We are definitely at the "stir up dumb white people with trans panic and scary non-white people with fuzzy-looking video" part of a GOP campaign. And it's become a consistent, solutionless GOP strategy to demoralize Dem voters and distract other ones.

Let's go back to the last time GOPs were polluting the MLB playoffs and other October sports viewing, back in 2022. And Roth wrote the definitive article on this strategy, titled "The Disgust is the Product." And in the article, Roth focused on gross ads being run by a RW front group known as Citizens for Sanity.
In theory, if not necessarily in practice, ideology exists at a remove from that kind of grubby, rube-running, retail stuff. If the political part can be understood as what a party actually does, the ideological aspect would be the ostensible reason why it does it. Given that the politics looks like what it looks like—one lavishly fetishized crisis after another, each carried forward through aligned media with the goal of creating in the consumer a constant state of furious full-spectrum derangement—the ideology is easy enough to guess. The obvious goal of all this is to get and keep people ready to do or think very strongly about how cool it would be to do some righteous violence against every other person and thing that exists. The name of the organization behind the advertisements, naturally, is Citizens For Sanity....

In its current state, Trumpism is entirely about feeling and fantasy. Instead of any plan to deal with crime, for instance, there is only the lascivious going-over of the problem; there is no program, or really any policies to advocate for, that is more expedient for the party than just continuing to fixate on it. There is a constituency — they are confused and vengeful and fucking livid, they are daily taking in and making up strange new stories to keep themselves that way, they are less mis- or disinformed than they are living inside the bilious and vengeful lore that sustains and explains their movement — and there is what that constituency feels, but there is nothing else. It is again worth noting that this constituency chooses to feel this way, every day; the most comfortable Americans have opted to wander this wilderness of prurience and threat and weird ugly lies instead of living in a reality they would have to share with anyone else. Where there might otherwise be ideology—where there might, actually, have been anything else—there is only politics. Of course it is ugly, small, even more fantastically dark than the truth of the moment. Being ugly, in precisely that way, is the reason that it exists. What began as a cynical set of best practices for keeping distracted people attached to their televisions has become the sacrament itself; they have built a church and then just fucking filled it with cable news.

In a characteristically thoughtful post about the advertisements at Baseball Prospectus, Steven Goldman wrote about how strange and jarring it was to see Citizens For Sanity's ads during these last weeks of extremely exciting and good baseball games, in part because those games consist, as baseball games do, of the best efforts of people from all over the world. "The dissonance tears something within you and you may feel distanced from the joy of the game," Goldman writes. "It’s exactly what they wanted." This is true, and the contrast between the baseball and the advertisements standing athwart it, yelling slurs, was certainly a big part of why I found the ads so repellent. But I also think that this collision is useful. It is not just that the two are in contrast, but that they are in some fundamental sense in conflict. You have these games, unfinished and alive and lit up with brilliance and the basic human thrill in things not yet known, and then you have its opposite: finished, closed, fearful, hateful, heaving itself into the way of all that life.
Trumpists want to bring low-information and casual voters down to their miserable and scared mentality, and anger Dems into distraction with this disgusting garbage. It is also intended to take the concept of hope and positive change away, and make people care more about hurting and resenting others, instead of trying to improve their own lives and demanding more of their government in making a society that improves their chances of stability and improvement.

And guess who gave a lot of money to Citizens for Sanity in 2022?

WSJ: Musk funded Stephen Miller's superPAC, which ran some of the nastiest, most vile and vicious anti-immigrant and anti-trans ads in 2022 "more than $50 million of Musk’s money funded a series of advertising campaigns by a group called Citizens for Sanity" www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

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— Joe Sudbay (@joesudbay.bsky.social) October 2, 2024 at 3:57 PM

I think we found the immigrant who's trying to wreck American society.

It seems well past time for Dems to go hard at oligarchs like Musk, and the hate merchants in the GOP in general. We know that the GOP's attempts to ignite a panic against trans people has been a loser with the wider electorate in the 2020s, and if it can be connected to the reality that GOPs don't want to talk about, which is the growing economy and respectful, decent country that exists in the Real America under Biden-Harris.

And if Elon Musk and the Uihleins (major donors to the smear ads against Tammy Baldwin) can try to get their anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda put in via ads about non-issues, why can't Dems forcefully attack GOPs on real issues? Including the Project 2025 Agenda that would allow a Trump or Vance Administration to turn wide swaths of Americans into second-class citizens, while allowing soulless corporations to run wild over the rights and protections of everyone else?

The only way that these lowlife GOP ads work in depressing Dem turnout is if Dems don't fight back against this garbage and stand up for the values and decency of Real America. I understand the point of the positive "moving forward" kind of campaign that the Harris-Walz team has been hitting on, and it probably does help them with some voters (like my mother, who voted GOP for president in every year from 1980 through 2016, but now votes Dem). But the best way for this country to move forward is to crush the bad guys who want to keep us dumb, desperate, and distracted.

Why don't Dems do a little "divide and conquer" themselves? And you know what else would fire up Dem base voters and reduce the feelings of being up against a wall of oligarch-funded RW hate and BS? Having Dems Americans that the blind eye to Republican lawlessness that Merrick Garland and Joe Biden have given for 4 years will be ended with Kamala Harris as President. And Harris can be included in a group of younger Dems in charge that realize The System doesn't work on its own, but instead requires constant work and activity to keep this country functional for all Americans, not just an elite few.

Anger and mockery is a strong weapon, when the anger and mockery is accurate. And there's plenty of Trump/GOP targets to hit, if Dems want to step up and win this election. It also should resonante to the majority of Americans, and make the GOP's idiotic and hateful ads look lame by comparison.
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Saturday, October 5, 2024

Big jobs report for September. In pretty much any way you want.

One month before the election, it was Jobs Report Friday this week! So what did we get?

​

Yep, it was a bigtime jobs report. On the payrolls side, gains were strong in a lot of areas, including continued strength in health care and a welcome rebound in leisure and hospitality. And the construction industry also kept hiring workers.
Employment in food services and drinking places rose by 69,000 in September, well above the average monthly gain of 14,000 over the prior 12 months.

Health care added 45,000 jobs in September, below the average monthly gain of 57,000 over the prior 12 months. Over the month, employment rose in home health care services (+13,000), hospitals (+12,000), and nursing and residential care facilities (+9,000).

Employment in social assistance increased by 27,000 in September, primarily in individual and family services (+21,000). Over the prior 12 months, social assistance had added an average of 21,000 jobs per month.

Construction employment continued to trend up in September (+25,000), similar to the average monthly gain over the prior 12 months (+19,000). Over the month, nonresidential specialty trade contractors added 17,000 jobs.
Also nice to see that unemployment dropped for the “good reason” – more people entering the work force, but even more Americans than that amount saying that they are now working.

​

“But c’mon Jake, you know this is going to be revised down, like they were in the past.” Revisions, you say?
The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for July was revised up by 55,000, from +89,000 to +144,000, and the change for August was revised up by 17,000, from +142,000 to +159,000. With these revisions, employment in July and August combined is 72,000 higher than previously reported.
"But it's all foreigners that are getting the jobs. Try again, MAGAts.

So this is a blowout report, almost to a point where it’s too strong. Because it might slow down the speed of future interest rate cuts that the Federal Reserve may put in.
Within minutes, traders of futures that settle to the Fed's policy rate had all but abandoned bets on another upsized interest rate reduction before the end of this year, and moved to price in quarter-point reductions instead.

They are also pricing in an end point to the rate-cutting at somewhere between 3.25% and 3.75% by the middle of next year, above the 3.00% to 3.25% end-point range that traders had previously seen likely. The current range is 4.75% to 5.00%....

Friday's jobs report "is a potential game changer for the Fed and market expectations on the size and pace of future rate cuts," BMO economists wrote. "It also is a big upside risk to our consumer spending and GDP growth forecasts in the near-term."

Expectations could still change before the Fed's Nov. 6-7 policy meeting, which will come after fresh data on inflation and another monthly jobs report.
Oh no! We have a strong jobs market with good wage growth! Whatever will we do!

The wage increases are also nice to see, and continue a positive trend. We already knew that inflation-adjusted median household incomes had recovered back to 2019’s levels for 2023, and before today’s report, we had seen average hourly wages went up by 2.6% through August while the CPI only rose by 1.7%.

Now add in another 0.4% increase for September with hourly wages, and the knowledge that gas prices continued to trend down last month while food prices haven’t changed much, and it seems likely that those real wage gains are even larger now.

Republicans took the good jobs news in stride.

​

And Little Marco shrinks even more….

It again illustrates that a big question in this election comes down to whether voters are looking around and recognizing that the US has a strong economy with continued job growth and wage gains, and want to keep this going. Or do more voters buy the “crippling inflation and tough times” theme that Republicans are trying to sell (with no GOP solutions for these (non)-problems, mind you).

If we have an electorate that votes based on facts and reality, then Kamala Harris and the Dems should win. Which is likely why Republicans are spending so much ad money trying to convince people that what they’re seeing in their communities and in the economy in general isn’t real. Or that "scary" illegal immigrants and trans people are around every corner and.... existing?

Don’t be stupid, people. Believe what we see in the real world, and not the one that the TV ads and their oligarch funders are trying to convince you of.
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Wednesday, October 2, 2024

In 2024, do we choose the MAGAland of Make-Believe, or deal with reality and go forward?

I was heading into work and heard Wisconsin writer Mike McCabe on the radio, and he mentioned his most recent substack column, which discussed how so much of today's political discourse exists in a Land of Make-Believe.

On stage stands a very famous man, perhaps sensing his appeal is wearing thin, maybe fearing what the mileage on his tread could mean to his future prospects. The very famous man, brimming with intention, certain the willing and able are large in number, hurls an audacious lie to the wind, confident it will float as far and wide as a dandelion’s seeds.
In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs . . . they’re eating the cats.
He didn’t care it wasn’t true, didn’t give a thought to how many this preposterous yet vicious lie would hurt. The very famous man’s consort, undoubtedly sensing his railcar is hitched to a runaway train, surely fearing the coming wreck, nevertheless did not try jumping to safety. He stayed on board.
If I have to create stories . . . then that’s what I’m going to do.
Lies like these ones are akin to nuclear blasts, causing devastation at ground zero before showering toxic fallout over a wide radius. There are the immediate casualties. Then there’s the collateral damage.
McCabe then mentions that a reader complained about McCabe's decision to write a novel, as there was too much fiction in our political world, and we didn't more in another form. McCabe uses that comment to note that the barrage of Trumpian lies in 2024 America is limiting the ability of many of us to see things as they are, and more importantly, to visualize what things can become.
Several things bother me about this reader’s reaction. It conflates fiction writing and dishonesty, as if fiction and false mean the same thing. They do not. It also conflates factuality and truth. The two can go hand in hand, but that doesn’t make them exactly alike. Nonfiction is confined by facts, and that can prevent the whole truth from being told. Fiction is more unbounded, depending on imagination to identify and describe encompassing truths. Works of nonfiction or fiction both can lie. Either can speak truth.

Most troubling to me is how pervasive and persistent dishonesty can disparage and discourage imagination. If we stick to the facts before us and call off the search for yet undiscovered truths, hope for human progress is lost. If we trust only what currently is and stop trying to imagine what could be, the potential of civilization to advance is crippled.
And when certain people spend all of their time being scared about things that aren’t real, they don’t care to go outside and see what’s actually happening, and deal with that reality. It limits our growth, and sets us back.

Republicans know they can’t win in November if the election is based on reality. So they do things such as blowing up isolated incidents into “rampant migrant crime” while ignoring the myriad more crimes that are committed by Americans with guns and committed against women on a daily basis.

This is also why Republicans keep having ads where GOP activists everyday voters complain about “crushing inflation” when inflation has been under control for the last 18 months, to a point where the Federal Reserve is now cutting interest rates. GOPs also never mention that ever-increasing corporate profits are likely a significant reason behind the price rises of the 2020s, because that would require them to mention that concern and possibly have to give a solution to it. And they'd have to introduce that into the BubbleWorld that many GOP-leaning voters live in, which is not something GOPs want.

And why this is done is illustrated in an excellent column from Rick Perlstein in the American Prospect today.

"Journalistic norms are not a suicide pact." prospect.org/politics/202...

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— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein.bsky.social) October 2, 2024 at 9:36 AM

He starts the column by looking back at an article from 2004 in The New Republic written by a young Chris Hayes, who was walking around Wisconsin trying to figure out what undecided voters wanted in an election that would be decided by less than 1% up here.
The future MSNBC host’s TNR piece was an account of the lessons he learned canvassing among undecided voters in Wisconsin for John Kerry. It incinerates a basic foundation of how political junkies think: “Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the ‘issues.’ That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs.”

Chris noted that while there were a few people he talked to like that, “such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I’d just asked them to name their favorite prime number … the very concept of the ‘issue’ seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to.”
Which means that there isn't a lot of deep analysis going on with these voters. They're just going on vibes and feelings.

And that's where Trumpian idiocy comes in, because by giving simple reasons and shallow statements to deal with real, complex problems, it takes the place of the honest, hard work and adjustments that real solutions require. Perlstein says that this allows for weak, vulnerable Americans to be susceptible to loudmouthed strongmen who don't ask anything more of them beyond "blame these others for why things are going wrong for you" and not have to put any more effort to improve your life.
Millions of pages have been filled by scholars explaining the psychological appeal of fascism, most converging on the blunt fact that it offers the fantasy of reversion to an infantile state, where nothing can come and harm you, because you will be protected by an all-powerful figure who will always put you first, always put you first. It is simply indisputable that this promise can seduce and transform even intelligent, apparently mature, kind-hearted people formerly committed to liberal politics. I’ve written before in this column about the extraordinary film The Brainwashing of My Dad, in which director Jen Senko describes the transformation of her Kennedy-liberal dad under the influence of right-wing talk radio and Fox News—and also how, after she explained the premise of her film for a Kickstarter campaign, scores of people came out of the woodwork to share similar stories about their own family members.

I’ve learned a lot about the psychological dynamics at work from the X feed of a psychologist named Julie Hotard, who drills down on the techniques Fox uses to trigger infantilization in viewers. The people at Fox who devise these scripts, one imagines, are pretty sophisticated people. Trump’s gift is to be able to grunt out the same stuff just from his gut. Trump’s appeals have become noticeably more infantile in precisely this way. When he addresses women voters, for instance: “I am your protector. I want to be your protector … You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger …”...
Perlstein then combines Hayes' observations of undecided Sconnies from 20 years ago, and how these types of voters are basically deciding what American reality they are going to live in.
I imagine that what at least some of them — certainly more than those supposedly entering the two candidates’ issue positions onto spreadsheets to study, ruling out the candidate not “specific” enough about their fiscal policies — are undecided because they are poised at a threshold. “Undecided” is a way station between the final surrender to the Trumpian fantasy, and all the imaginary comforts it offers, and sticking with the rest of us in the reality-based community, despite all the existential terrors the real world affords.
It really feels like this election comes down to a relatively straightforward question. Do you believe that the country is going downhill, times are tough, and scary brown people are marauding the streets and making you cower in your basement? Or do you go outside, touch grass, look around, and realize things are much better than the hellscape we were in 4 years ago. And that you want to live in a diverse and becalmed country where respect for others is a virtue, versus something to be taken advantage of.

It seems like an easy choice, but it also involves thinking and making an effort to care. What MAGA is counting on is that enough Americans won’t do those things, and allow them to grab power through fear, idiocy, and self-centeredness. And if the bad guys win, we will have rulers that are not based in reality, dealing with non-problems and residing in BubbleWorld instead of real life.

The MAGA-GOPs would be using their power to actively build their Bubble of BS higher, and put those lies and deflections into policies and laws. We would then have a country that wouldn't be worth saving, because enough of its citizenry has decided it doesn't want to deal with reality, and there will be no sense for those of us living in the reality-based community to exert any effort to dig these jackwagons out of the hole that MAGAts will have put us in.
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