The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark on the Michigan state senate’s investigation of the 2020 election:

While the report identifies “clear weaknesses in our elections system that require legislative remedy,” it is unsparing about misinformation and innuendo. As Democrats regained power after the 2016 election, Mr. McBroom writes, “they were quick to utilize all of it to spend two years chasing every conspiracy and specious allegation.” He adds: “I pray my own party will not repeat this mistake for the next four years.”

The committee investigated 200 alleged dead voters. Only two problems were found. One was “a clerical error” involving a father and son with the same name. The other was an absentee ballot submitted by a 92-year-old, who then died four days before the election. That bad ballot should not have slipped through, though the report says 3,500 similar votes were caught.

Detroit’s counting center received deliveries of ballots at 3:30 a.m. and 4:30 a.m., but the inquiry found no evidence of fraud. A purportedly suspicious picture “was a photo of a WXYZ-TV photographer hauling his equipment.” Also, look at the numbers: Voter turnout in Wayne County (Detroit) was up only 11.4% last year, compared with 15.4% in the rest of Michigan, which hardly sounds like a dump of fake ballots. President Trump received a higher share of Wayne County’s vote in 2020 than in 2016.

The 35 page report can be found here if you care to read it. The bottom line is that Joe Biden did in fact carry Michigan. I don’t know what that portends for Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona but I think that Trump’s supporters should be prepared that Trump really did lose the 2020 election. Additionally, Mr. Trump’s behavior following the election is unlikely to gain votes for him should he be the Republican Party’s standardbearer in 2024. He will also be over 80 years old then—too old for him to be president. It’s over.

Unlike many Democrats I don’t that the conclusion to draw from all this sturm und drang is not how vile Republicans are but that our elections need to be more rigorous and transparent. Like Caesar’s wife they should be beyond reproach.

At Roll Call David Winston wonders whether Joe Biden will choose progressives or bipartisanship, noting that there’s some evidence that Democrats are miscalculating in taking the temperature of the American people:

The White House and congressional Democrats thought they could bring voters along by simply calling social spending programs they’ve wanted for years “infrastructure” on the front end. It is clear that there is buy-in from the electorate for reasonable government spending on true infrastructure. But contrary to what Democrats are arguing, they haven’t won over voters for their record-setting “human infrastructure” proposals offered in the name of economic growth.

The key point is that most Americans don’t believe that increased infrastructure spending will spur economic growth:

However, when the concept of traditional infrastructure spending is introduced, voter support went from only 36 percent believing in government spending to 50 percent believing that increased government spending on infrastructure like roads and bridges would generate economic growth.

On this statement, Republicans are neutral (39 percent to 40 percent). Independents tend to believe this more than not (45 percent to 32 percent). Not surprisingly, Democrats’ belief in the connection between infrastructure spending and growth is even stronger (65 percent to 16 percent).

That’s an odd diction. I don’t believe that increased government spending on infrastructure will increase economic growth (for reasons I called out yesterday). I do believe that improved infrastructure will increase economic growth. The difference between the two is a short term vs. long term one.

IMO Mr. Biden will choose the progressives or, said another way he will choose party unity over national unity. That’s implicit in his political history which, as I have previously noted, is that he is a centrist in the sense that he determines where the center of the Democratic Party is and heads there. Since the party is being pushed left by the its progressives faster than the country as a whole, the consequences of that could prove interesting.

I am human and as a human being I have biases. I try my level best to recognize them and I try to be as objective as I can in viewing events.

Recently, I was accused of having implicit biases (everyone has them) but I believe that what the critic was seeing was his or her own biases which I challenged with my evidence-based conclusions. Just because you come in in the middle of a conversation, don’t assume you know its entire context.

Unlike most people I can be convinced with logic and evidence. I am highly resistant, however, to being browbeaten.

Update

I have been tested as being in the 99th percentile for introception. That means the personality trait that predisposes one to understanding the needs, motives, and experiences both of him or herself and others. In other words, I’m more likely to recognize my own biases than just about anyone you’ve ever met. I also test very high for nurturance (offering care and concern to others) and very low for succorance (seeking care).

At Project Syndicate Mouriel Roubini issues a warning:

NEW YORK – In April, I warned that today’s extremely loose monetary and fiscal policies, when combined with a number of negative supply shocks, could result in 1970s-style stagflation (high inflation alongside a recession). In fact, the risk today is even bigger than it was then.

After all, debt ratios in advanced economies and most emerging markets were much lower in the 1970s, which is why stagflation has not been associated with debt crises historically. If anything, unexpected inflation in the 1970s wiped out the real value of nominal debts at fixed rates, thus reducing many advanced economies’ public-debt burdens.

Conversely, during the 2007-08 financial crisis, high debt ratios (private and public) caused a severe debt crisis – as housing bubbles burst – but the ensuing recession led to low inflation, if not outright deflation. Owing to the credit crunch, there was a macro shock to aggregate demand, whereas the risks today are on the supply side.

We are thus left with the worst of both the stagflationary 1970s and the 2007-10 period. Debt ratios are much higher than in the 1970s, and a mix of loose economic policies and negative supply shocks threatens to fuel inflation rather than deflation, setting the stage for the mother of stagflationary debt crises over the next few years.

He concludes:

Under these conditions, central banks will be damned if they do and damned if they don’t, and many governments will be semi-insolvent and thus unable to bail out banks, corporations, and households. The doom loop of sovereigns and banks in the eurozone after the global financial crisis will be repeated worldwide, sucking in households, corporations, and shadow banks as well.

As matters stand, this slow-motion train wreck looks unavoidable. The Fed’s recent pivot from an ultra-dovish to a mostly dovish stance changes nothing. The Fed has been in a debt trap at least since December 2018, when a stock- and credit-market crash forced it to reverse its policy tightening a full year before COVID-19 struck. With inflation rising and stagflationary shocks looming, it is now even more ensnared.

So, too, are the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, and the Bank of England. The stagflation of the 1970s will soon meet the debt crises of the post-2008 period. The question is not if but when.

The preponderance of the evidence suggests that a large public debt overhang impedes economic growth. There is no “cliff” at 100% of GDP as was once believed but the evidence still says that debt reduces growth. And politicians will never want to reduce spending. It’s no way to get re-elected. A crisis has been baked in for some time.

Stagflation I can live with. What worries me is the prospect of a catastrophic loss of confidence in the dollar and we’re doing the best we can to induce one.

I found Sean Trende’s discussion of poll results at RealClearPolitics pretty interesting:

For my regressions, I used the same controls for each aspect I examined: gender, age, race/ethnicity, and income.

With controls in place, Hispanic voters, for example, are less likely to consider themselves highly patriotic than white voters, but not nearly to the extent of black or Asian voters. Being Hispanic increases your odds, all other things being equal, of giving a less patriotic response than whites by 17%, compared to 48% for blacks and 89% for Asians.

Likewise, with controls in place, Hispanics were more likely to be Democrats than similarly situated whites, but not overwhelmingly so. With controls in place, the odds that a voter who was Hispanic would be a Democrat were 11% higher than that he or she would be Republican, compared to 62% for blacks. This is encouraging for Republicans, as it suggests that as Hispanic voters continue to climb the socioeconomic ladder, they may continue to pick up GOP voting habits.

Interestingly, and perhaps counterintuitively, with controls in place the racial groups in the survey exhibited no statistically significant divergence from whites on the question of whether illegal immigration is a major problem, a minor problem, or no problem at all. Likewise, with controls in place, Hispanics are no more likely than whites to say that immigration has done more good than harm. Blacks, however, are more likely than whites to say that immigration has done more harm than good, with controls in place.

While there is more Hispanic support for the DREAM Act than there is among whites, things like a pathway to citizenship show no significant differences between racial groups, once controls are in place.

The survey also asked about Hispanic subgroups. While the number of respondents is low, the regression analysis finds no significant differences between subgroups in levels of Republicanism. This is surprising, but is consistent with interpretations of Cuban American levels of Republicanism being attributable largely to socioeconomic status. Cuban Americans were, however, significantly more likely than other subgroups to respond that immigration did more harm than good. This could reflect the unique status of Cuban Americans with respect to immigration laws, or intra-Hispanic attitudes toward other groups. Cuban Americans were also more likely to support fining employers who employ illegal immigrants.

More than anything else it suggests to me that both Democrats and Republicans are making some pretty poor assumptions.

I’m getting whiplash. Here’s Josh Gerstein and Zach Montellaro’s take on the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision at Politico:

The Supreme Court’s ruling in a Voting Rights Act case Thursday may appear modest in scope and subdued in rhetoric, but it will have a sweeping impact — undercutting efforts to challenge a slew of new laws Republican-led states have passed imposing new restrictions on the ballot, lawyers and civil rights activists said.

“It will have a devastating impact on our ability, and other civil rights groups’ ability, to protect the rights of voters through the courts,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson.

The 6-3 loss for voting rights advocates also resurfaced second-guessing of the Democratic National Committee’s decision to file the suit on which the justices ruled, targeting Arizona’s longstanding refusal to allow out-of-precinct voting and a 2016 law banning collection of mail-in ballots through a practice critics call “ballot harvesting.”

“Certainly in retrospect, one would say this case was not the best case to bring,” said David Cole, the national legal director of the ACLU, conceding that evidence of discrimination was “fairly weak” for the two practices challenged in Arizona.

“The fact that the court overturned the rulings, with respect to those two practices in Arizona, is not what’s disturbing about the decision,” he continued. “What’s most disturbing about the decision is how the majority has essentially rewritten Section 2, broadly, to make it more difficult in all future cases to challenge voter suppression methods.”

while here’s the reaction from the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

The Supreme Court issued its ruling of the year on Thursday in upholding two Arizona voting rules. In a single blow, the Justices shot down efforts to politicize the Voting Rights Act and saved federal courts from becoming super election commissions.

Democrats in Brnovich v. DNC challenged Arizona’s ban on ballot harvesting and a requirement that voters cast ballots on Election Day in the precinct of the county where they’re registered. They claim the rules have a disparate adverse impact on minority groups and violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. A district judge found no evidence the rules were discriminatory in intent or effect. But liberal judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overruled the lower court.

Progressives have been bombarding courts with challenges to state voting laws under Section 2 since the High Court in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) struck down the Voting Rights Act’s requirement that the Justice Department or federal courts sign off on election-law changes in states with histories of discrimination. The Biden Administration’s lawsuit against Georgia’s new voting law is based on Section 2.

I suspect that voter suppression and vote fraud are the opposite sides of the same coin. While I think that both happen regularly it’s probably at a much lower level than “activists” of either party believe. In other words both those who claim either one is rampant or that either one is nonexistent are wrong.

I’m also suspicious of centralizing power and in particular in granting authority to judges that the Constitution has given to the states.

Beyond that I have no particular view of the decision. Comments?

“The Blob” is the term used to refer to a large mass of relatively warm water in the eastern Pacific that contributed to the peculiar weather conditions on the West Coast of the U. S. from 2013 to 2016. The Blob was related to the even more amusingly-named Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, a static upper layer of water attributed to a static high pressure system. Some think these phenomena are related to the Pacific decadal oscillation, a cycle that repeats over irregular intervals. IMO it is almost certain that the Blog is back and is contributing to the extremely hot weather in the Pacific Northwest.

The Biden Administration attributes the weather to global warming and, indeed, the weather on the Pacific Coast may be affected by human behavior. Contrary to some of my readers I do believe that human factors are involved in what’s been going on. I differ from the administration, however, in that I think that human influence is much more notable in influencing local weather conditions than it is in global conditions and that the proposed strategy and timeframe are completely wrong.

It isn’t just me complaining about Mayor Lightfoot. The Washington Post’s Micheline Maynard observes:

The Chicago Tribune, in an article last month about Lightfoot’s staffing problems and “notoriously abrasive leadership style,” included an email in which the mayor blasted her scheduler. The email began, “Since my prior requests for office time are routinely ignored, I am now resorting to this,” then Lightfoot wrote 16 times in a row, “I need office time every day!” before eventually signing off by writing 13 times in a row “Have I made myself clear, finally?!”

Also last month, she told news organizations that she would do one-on-one interviews only with journalists of color to mark her two-year anniversary in office. A Latino reporter at the Tribune, Gregory Pratt, canceled an interview to protest the restriction, and Clarence Page, a veteran Black columnist at the paper, labeled the policy a “stunt,” saying, “thanks … but no thanks.”

In the latest contretemps, during a June 23 Chicago City Council meeting, Lightfoot got into a finger-jabbing argument, in full view of the public and journalists, with Black Alderwoman Jeannette Taylor over Lightfoot’s nominee to be the city’s top attorney.

Indeed, some of Mayor Lightfoot’s harshest critics are black women. They comprise many of those picketing her home.

She concludes:

Donald Trump frequently taunted Lightfoot while he was president, to the point where the mayor snapped back, “Keep Chicago out of your lying mouth.” Trump was an agent of chaos from the right. Lightfoot cannot become an agent of chaos from the left if she wants to build a legacy worthy of the promise that her election held.

I’d say the supply of chaos far exceeds the demand. I think there is a longing for change but change requires higher levels of knowledge and competence than appear to be available.

This piece from NJ.com conveys a somewhat different perspective on President Biden’s infrastructure spending bill:

President Biden nearly scuttled the bipartisan infrastructure deal last week by inserting his foot in his mouth, but he recovered over the weekend and put the compromise back on track.

Now, progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are doing their best to kill it again, and it looks like their problem has deeper roots. If they don’t change their minds, the compromise deal will be back on life support soon.

That’s crazy. The compromise gives Biden roughly one-quarter of the new spending that he originally sought in his grab-bag infrastructure plan, so this glass is not even half-full, granted. But the compromise includes nearly $600 billion in new spending, making it the largest infrastructure plan in decades. (It’s been falsely advertised as double that amount by counting money that’s already agreed to or in the pipeline.)

The money is sorely needed, and would be spent over eight years, focused on traditional infrastructure programs like roads, bridges, broadband access, water and sewer pipes, and electric vehicles.

Now let’s stop right there. The bipartisan plan is focused on infrastructure; Sen. Sanders and his supporters insist on massively subsidized consumer spending. As Warner Wolf used to say, let’s go to the videotape. Here is what has happened to consumer spending recently:

There is not a shred of evidence that more consumer spending, powered by government debt, will bolster economic growth. Neither Keynesian economic nor Modern Monetary Theory would make that claim. If you think otherwise, I suggest a remedial economics course.

Let me provide an alternative explanation. While the lockdowns persisted consumer spending drooped. That was to be expected. People couldn’t shop and were afraid of what would come next. Rather than spending people saved as this graph avers:

Now that lockdowns have ended in most places consumer spending and savings are returning to their previous trajectories.

What will the impact of all of the debt-fueled spending be? And why do they insist on it? It isn’t to foster economic growth. It isn’t to help the poor since much of the money will go to the middle class and upper middle class.