SCRATCHPAD: 2024-07-02 Mo: Biden Needs to Quit the Candidacy & the Presidency; & Immunity for "Official Acts" Is the Most Unoriginalist Opinion Ever; & MOAR...
Politics: Biden has had five full days now to show that he is capable of doing more than being somewhat convincing while reading a teleprompter. He has not done so. He needs to resign the candidacy and also the presidency, today:
Josh Barro: The Same Fools Telling Us Not to Panic About Biden Are the Ones Who Let Him Get on That Stage: ‘We cannot trust the political judgment of Biden and his inner circle after this massive fuckup…. Voters… have now seen a naked and appalling display of his confusion and frailty. It’s hard to imagine a more spectacular way for a campaign tactic to backfire…. Biden’s team is famously insular, and the disastrous choice to debate must have been made by a handful of people… who had far more information than any of us on the outside had. While I assumed the campaign’s willingness to debate meant Biden was still able to put up an adequate debate performance like he did repeatedly during the 2020 campaign cycle, they should have known from their close daily interactions with him that there was great risk that he would fail badly. A lot of people are angry this week because they feel they have been extensively lied to by the Biden operation, but I think the situation is even worse than that. Biden’s closest circle were clearly lying to themselves, because if they could have seen this coming, they would not have put the president on that stage. Now in the aftermath of the debate, the very same people who created this mess have been lecturing the rest of us, saying we are the “bedwetting brigade,”1 that the campaign’s internal polls haven’t changed, and that if the public polls continue to get worse, that will just be due to “overblown media narratives” and therefore “temporary.” You will have to excuse me for not believing that these people have any fucking idea what they are doing… <https/://www.joshbarro.com/p/the-same-fools-telling-us-not-to>
And:
Brian Stelter: ‘Biden, engulfed in a political crisis of his own making, isn't acting like it's a crisis. No news conference, no interview, hardly any interactions with the press or public. Is it fair to say, if he could, he would?… <https://www.threads.net/@brianstelter/post/C87dP_RMpSX>
Yes. It is fair to say: if he could, he would.
Neofascism: Article II, §3 of the U.S. Constitution says: “The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present. Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law…” The U.S. Constitution says as plainly as it can possibly say that impeachment does not mean that a subsequent criminal trial is in no sense double jeopardy. And its complete silence on the idea that any official has any immunity for “official acts” speaks wonders about what the original founders thought of the idea that any official was in any sense above the law:
Dan Drezner: The Rant of an Institutionalist: ‘Every once in a while I think about something my comparative politics colleague Tom Pepinsky wrote about life in an authoritarian society…. “You know that you are no longer living in a democracy because the elections in which you are participating no longer can yield political change.” Pepinsky noted yesterday about the SCOTUS decision: “This isn’t a ruling for 45, this is permission for 47.” That is exactly right. To his credit, Joe Biden explicitly rejected the protections the Supreme Court wants to endow the office of the presidency, saying, “This nation was founded on the principle that there are no kings in America”. If he loses to Donald Trump in November, that principle will also lose — as will the last remaining shreds of faith I have in the U.S. system of government… <https/://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-rant-of-an-institutionalist>
Neofascism: Yes, the future of liberal democracy—if not of neofascist plebiscitary democracy—hangs in the balance in this Year of Our Lord 2024: 1) A Trump victory in the US could turn the nation into a semi-elected semi-autocracy and destroy the liberal global order. 2) Even where the neofascists are in retreat, repairing the damage they have done to liberal democracy will not be easy: see Poland. And 3) autocrats will continue to undermine trust in democratic societies. Neofascist governments infiltrate and then coördinate formerly independent institutions. Neofascist governments and movements disinform. Kleptocrats and plutocrats make up identity-politics grievances to convince potential neofascist supporters that their economic difficulties are not due to kleptocrats and plutocrats taking the lion’s share, but rather that the kleptocrats and plutocrats are allies against them:
Marc Filippino & Martin Wolf: Democracy’s Year of Peril: ‘The US has been the central country…. A fundamental shift in its role in the world and its own ideological stance… will transform the world profoundly…. It could well mean we give up Ukraine to Putin…. The functioning of the EU in the western alliance [could] disappear…. Turning the United States… will… make relations between the US and China… far worse…. All this, if it happens, would mean probably abandoning any serious attempt to deal with climate change… [and] the risks associated with climate change have been underestimated…. We are getting temperatures in important parts of the world… at which people really can’t survive and certainly not work…. [These] are all, seem to me, pretty big concerns… <https://www.ft.com/content/0a0f9508-626c-4073-be38-517245a029c2>
Economics: According to the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices inflation concept, there is no "last mile" problem:
BLS: Consumer Price Index: R-HICP Homepage: ‘The Bureau began calculating an index following the European definition of the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) as a research project. Data were initially shared in the Monthly Labor Review article bls.gov/opub/mlr/2006/05/art3full.pdf published in 2006 and we have continued monthly calculation of the experimental US-HICP since then. The HICP differs from the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) in two major respects. First, the HICP includes the rural population in its scope. Second, and probably more importantly, the HICP excludes owner-occupied housing. To construct the R-HICP, the CPI was narrowed to remove the owner-occupied housing costs that the HICP excludes from its scope. The CPI does not collect prices in rural areas, and the R-HICP uses price data collected for the CPI-U population, so this research index does not exactly match the population coverage of the HICP. Like the Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose (COICOP) system, the HICP facilitates international comparisons of price change… <bls.gov/cpi/research-series/r-hicp-home…>
MAMLMs: How good and useful are GPT LLMs as summarization engines? For example, what do we think of this?:
Macroeconomics: The belief that r* is elevated because right now expansionary fiscal policy is stimulating the economy and so boosting economic growth makes no sense! Remember to take appropriate derivatives!:
Eli Asdourian, Georgia Nabors, Lorae Stojanovic, & Louise Sheiner: Federal, State & Local Fiscal Policy & the Economy: ‘Fiscal policy increased U.S. GDP growth by less than 0.1 percentage point in the first quarter of 2024, the Hutchins Center Fiscal Impact Measure (FIM) shows. The FIM translates changes in taxes and spending at federal, state, and local levels into changes in aggregate demand, illustrating the effect of fiscal policy on real GDP growth. GDP increased at an annual rate of 1.4% in the first quarter of 2024, according to the government’s latest estimate. A decline in tax collections since 2022 and the increase in investment from the Inflation Reduction Act and Chips Act (which we include as negative taxes) increased the FIM by 0.6 percentage point in the first quarter. This was offset by the waning effects of pandemic-era transfers and subsidies, which decreased the FIM by 0.6 percentage point… <https://www.brookings.edu/articles/hutchins-center-fiscal-impact-measure/?b=1>
If you want to believe that r* today is higher than the very low values it was stuck at for the entire decade of the 2010s, you need to find another, different argument. Once such argument is that the growing stock of safe national debt issued by nations with exorbitant privilege has finally repaired the global safe-asset shortage. Another is that the industrial transformation subsidies now in train are uniquely effective in having strong multiplier-accelerator effects in boosting investment. A third is—there is no third.
Management Cybernetics: Who and where and when was the best version of the following course taught?:
Steering the Organization—or, Rather, Building a Steerable Organization:
Economics: ALL THE PCE NUMBERS FOR MAY SEE INFLATION AT TARGET RIGHT NOW: The only reasons for monetary policy not to be neutral would be (a) seriously asymmetric risks on the inflation side, or (b) a belief that fiscal policy's stimulative effect is strong, and needs to be offset. I do not see how you can argue that either of those things are true:
BEA: Personal Income and Outlays, May 2024: ‘The PCE price index decreased less than 0.1 percent. Excluding food and energy, the PCE price index increased 0.1 percent (table 5). Real DPI increased 0.5 percent in May and real PCE increased 0.3 percent; goods increased 0.6 percent and services increased 0.1 percent (tables 3 and 4)… <bea.gov/sites/default/files/2024-06/pi0…>
Journamalism: The reporters here are Shane Goldmacher andRuth Igielnik. They need to find other and very different jobs:
Normative: ‘Lots of folks have pointed out that this weirdly tries to frame a *really significant* vote shift in a close election as unimportant. I’ll also add that you can basically ignore the answers from self-IDed Rs and Ds, because those people are clearly lying. Anyone so deep down the rabbit hole that they say they’re “more likely” to support Trump because a jury found him guilty of felonies was 100% already voting for Trump. They’re just expressing disapproval: NYTIMES: ‘In the first poll by The New York Times and Siena College since Donald Trump’s Manhattan trial ended with a guilty verdict, more than two-thirds of voters said the outcome made no difference to their vote <https://tinyurl.com/42bak7xm>… <https://www.threads.net/@normative/post/C8ueK3TxIO_>
Here's a scratchpad thought: it is really, really not a good look for a bunch of 30-something to 40-ish white male pundits who claim to be reality-based spinning alternate Democratic candidate scenarios in which every suggested candidate is not the sitting Vice-President of the United States.
Last night Noah wrote that inflation is running at 3.5 to 4.0% (I assume core PCE). That was true for Q1 and April, but the previous 2 quarters were 2.0%, and May was even less. We can pick our time period to make our point. Noah argued that a big reason stubborn high inflation was the large fiscal deficit, therefore we need to slash the deficit.
That sounds sensible, but what if Q1's 3.7% inflation was a blip, and longer term it is 2%, and then we cut deficit spending severely - do we end up back at zero inflation ... and possibly zero interest rates?
Here's a scratchpad thought: it is really, really not a good look for a bunch of 30-something to 40-ish white male pundits who claim to be reality-based spinning alternate Democratic candidate scenarios in which every suggested candidate is not the sitting Vice-President of the United States.
Last night Noah wrote that inflation is running at 3.5 to 4.0% (I assume core PCE). That was true for Q1 and April, but the previous 2 quarters were 2.0%, and May was even less. We can pick our time period to make our point. Noah argued that a big reason stubborn high inflation was the large fiscal deficit, therefore we need to slash the deficit.
That sounds sensible, but what if Q1's 3.7% inflation was a blip, and longer term it is 2%, and then we cut deficit spending severely - do we end up back at zero inflation ... and possibly zero interest rates?