Kevin Drum

Wall Street is panicking over the stock market. Here's what it looks like at the moment I'm writing this:

This is not yet even in "correction" territory, let alone a full-blown collapse. But a headline in the New York Times says traders are so panicked they think the Fed might hold an emergency meeting to cut rates.

I'd be fine with that, of course, though not because of modest losses on the stock market. I just think the Fed has kept rates far too high for far too long, so I'd be happy for any sign that they were taking the possibility of a downturn seriously. At this point, I really don't think inflation is what we need to be worrying about over the next year.

Is California a high-tax state compared to red states like Texas and Florida? It depends! Here's what things look like if you're rich:

California is a ball-buster, with the second highest tax rates in the country. Texas and Florida are way down the list.

But what if you're working class? Let's take a look:

California is about average, with a tax rate lower than either Texas or Florida. Texas has the ninth highest tax rate in the country if you're working class.

This all comes from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which earlier this year published its latest data on tax rates by state. Overall, California is indeed a high-tax-high-service state, but the big difference is that Texas and Florida tax grocery store clerks and janitors way more than they tax millionaires. California taxes them less.

It's sort of fascinating to watch The Big Lie unfold in real time. In this case I'm talking about Donald Trump's assertion that Kamala Harris used to identify as Indian and then switched to being Black when it became politically expedient.

Usually there's some small kernel of truth to these kinds of attacks, but this time there isn't even that. It's simply invented out of whole cloth. Harris has always IDed as biracial and nothing about that has ever changed.

Despite this, conservatives have eagerly taken up the charge, hoping to repeat it often enough that it sinks in. But why? What's the point?

It's not just because they're afraid to disagree with Trump. Nor is it because Trump's accusation was just a weird flub. It was planned in advance with malice aforethought and it was very deliberately done in front of a Black audience. That's because it was intended to appeal to a longtime obsession of the right: namely that identity politics and accusations of "systemic racism" are just a con job by liberals. Kamala Harris, Trump is implying, is a perfect case. She's really Indian-American but then cynically adopted Blackness so that she could complain about "racist attacks" from conservatives.

This is why a seemingly trivial falsehood is more powerful than it appears. It confirms the widespread view in MAGA world that Harris is just another race hustler out to weaponize her dark skin against whites. In reality, it's white people who have suffered increasing discrimination in recent years, right?

A couple of days ago I posted a chart showing that Democrats were more likely to be childless than Republicans. I thought this was mainly due to religiosity, but I wasn't sure.

However, a friend emailed me a link to Ryan Burge's substack, called "Graphs About Religion." This is an admirably clear name, and it delivers what he promises. What he found is that religion has a lot to do with childlessness, but not everything. Here's one chart:

Even if you compare regular churchgoers, Democrats are still less likely to have children. But there's some interesting detail in a second chart:

Among atheists and high-income mainline Protestants, Republicans are more likely to have children even after you control for some standard demographics. However, among evangelicals and Catholics, there's no difference.

So in the end, it's true that Democrats are less likely to have children than Republicans. But this is entirely due to differences among atheists and mainline Protestants. What's more, with a few basic controls in place the gaps become fairly modest. Overall, the difference is probably on the order of 5% or so.

Just for the record, it really is true that sometime soon Kamala Harris is going to have to (a) put up a few policy positions on her website, and (b) start giving interviews to the national media.

It doesn't have to be tomorrow, but it ought to be pretty soon.

US conservatives are in a remarkable lather over the results of a women's boxing match between an Algerian and an Italian. The Algerian is Imane Khelif, a journeyman welterweight with a lifetime record of 38-9, who suddenly might or might not be 100% female depending on who you listen to. Here's what happened.

Khelif was born and raised as a girl. She is not trans. No one argues about this.

On March 24, 2023, after reaching the finals of the IBA World Championships in New Delhi, Khelif was disqualified along with another boxer. The next day, the president of the IBA, Umar Kremlev, said: “Based on the results of DNA tests...it was proven that they have XY chromosomes.” No testosterone testing was done at the time, but more recently Kremlev said "There will be no athletes with high levels of testosterone competing in women's boxing championships." Nobody knows quite what this means.

According to IBA board minutes, both boxers had also tested male at the previous year's championships in Istanbul: "[George] Yerolimpos confirmed that IBA has the results from two independent laboratories in two different countries at its disposal, both of which indicate that the athletes do not meet one of the eligibility criteria to continue competing at the Championships."

Shortly afterward, Khelif filed an appeal but later dropped it. That made the IBA's decision legally binding. And since the International Olympic Committee has no gender rules of its own, deferring instead to each sport's governing body, that was that. Khelif wouldn't be able to compete at the Olympics.

Except for one thing: Thanks to a series of bribery and officiating scandals, the IOC broke off ties with the IBA in 2023. This meant that qualification for the Olympics defaulted to IOC rules, and there aren't any. They declared that both Khelif and the other boxer were eligible since they had no reason of their own to disqualify them.

So what's the deal? No one knows for sure. The IBA has been very cagey about what test they administered and has refused to clarify things. Nor have they explained why Khelif was allowed to compete in the first place if she had supposedly failed a test the year before.

Bottom line: The IBA says something is amiss, but it's too corrupt to be trusted and is refusing to provide any testing details. Plus Kremlev is sort of a known bigot who tweeted a couple of days ago that the Olympic Games are "outright sodomy." On the other hand, Khelif had the opportunity to appeal and decided not to. There are lots of possible reasons for this, but obviously one of them is that she knows she'd lose.

In any case, nobody seems to care very much about this except for Kremlev and Republicans in the US. The other boxers have just shrugged about it. It's not clear if we'll ever know more.

Donald Trump recently proposed eliminating income taxes on Social Security benefits. Why? No one knows. Maybe because low-income seniors already pay no tax on benefits, so it would mostly benefit the well off. And what Republican ever passed up the chance to make a regressive tax even more regressive?

In any case, let's see what Trump's fellow conservatives think of this:

Matt is being entirely too kind here. Stephen Moore was once commonly known as the stupidest man in the world, and this is why. First off, getting older people to stay on the workforce isn't a national priority for either party, as far as I know. Second, what does this have to do with taxing Social Security benefits anyway? Third, does Moore think this would cut Social Security costs? Why? Annual benefits go up if you retire later, so net lifetime benefits paid out are the same no matter when you retire.¹

So, fourth, I'm pretty sure Dems aren't mad they didn't think of this. It's a brain-dead idea that even the Heritage Foundation is too smart to endorse.² Only Donald Trump is dumb enough to propose something that would explicitly make Social Security's finances worse.

¹In addition, if you take Social Security benefits early—age 62, for example—but continue working, your benefits are reduced. However, they're made up either when you stop working or you reach age 67.

²Probably. Their 900-page Project 2025 tome, oddly, just doesn't have space to address Social Security. How about that? But I don't think they've ever proposed ending the tax on benefits, nor has any other conservative think tank.

Five weeks down, one to go. I'm almost done with my radiation treatment.

I'm pleased to report that the "super sunburn" pain I was warned about hasn't materialized. So far I've gotten a very minor bit of soreness in one or two places, and that's it. With only four treatments left it looks like I dodged this particular bullet.

Also, you may recall that the CAR-T treatment wiped out my immune system and killed off all my existing vaccinations. I've spent the past year being re-vaccinated for everything and today was the last one—assuming, of course, that whatever experimental treatment I get next doesn't kill off my immunities all over again. We'll see.

Yesterday morning I was wondering why I hadn't seen any new reporting about the prisoner swap the previous night. Charlotte Klein has the answer:

For days, various media outlets had been aware — through their own reporting and as information trickled out elsewhere — that a prisoner swap involving American journalists and dissidents was in the works. But news organizations were asked by the White House to hold their stories until Gershkovich et al. were in U.S. custody. Until then, the prisoners would still be in Russian captivity, and officials feared that any attention brought to the fragile deal could risk compromising it — not just for the U.S., but for the multiple other countries whose prisoners were freed as part of the swap.

Apparently everyone agreed to this (very normal) request except for Bloomberg, which published a report early in the morning when the American hostages boarded a plane in Russia and then followed it up ten minutes later with a football-spiking tweet bragging about their "scoop." Now everyone is pissed at them for breaking the embargo and potentially endangering the deal.

And for what? To beat other news outlets by a few hours on a story all of them had? Sheesh.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the key figure in the recent prisoner swap with Russia was German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. That's because the main sticking point was the release of Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin serving a life sentence in Germany for gunning down a Chechen exile in Berlin:

During a meeting in Saudi Arabia in early spring, the Germans revealed for the first time that they were ready to release Krasikov, but warned the Russians that the price would be much higher than previously discussed.

....The negotiations had dragged for so long that Russia started jailing Germans. By the talks’ final stages, about 30 German citizens were detained by Russia and its satellite, Belarus. Initially, Scholz refused to engage in hostage diplomacy, but after one German was sentenced to death in Belarus, the strategy became untenable.

Welcome to Vladimir Putin's Russia. Talks not going your way? Just keep kidnapping Germans until they see the light. What a monstrous, murderous thug.