Category: Update

At Ballotpedia, referenced here yesterday, we learn that a number of minimum wage measures were on the ballots this last election. The results were interesting. “In California and Massachusetts, voters rejected ballot measure to increase the minimum wage — the first time since 1996 that minimum wage increase measures were defeated.”

As Paul Jacob has often explained, in these pages, minimum wage hikes do not do what their advocates think, or at least say, they do. And the usual results present a problem for the policy’s advocates. A Reason article by Justin Zuckerman, “The New York Times Claimed D.C.’s Minimum Wage Hike Created Jobs. We Exposed Their Error,” from Friday, shows a grand example of a persuasive article in the Gray Lady being used to convince voters that a Washington, D.C., minimum wage hike did no harm while also being based on a gross misunderstanding of statistics. Its author “misunderstood the data she was looking at. The chart she linked to in the article presented numbers ‘in the thousands,’ meaning that the actual data were not 14,168 but 14,168,000, which also makes sense because Krishna [the Times contributor] didn’t realize she was reading national BLS data — not local figures.” A huge error. Which Reason told The Times about, “and the paper issued a correction.”

But the advocates for minimum wage hikes continued to cite the article, despite the error, despite the admission that was the official correction.

Some errors go on repeat because they re-inforce ideological prejudice. The minimum wage is one of those policies usually advanced in ignorance of all the work done on the issue. Often in defiance of common sense.

Last Monday, Paul Jacob covered the brewing story of Federal Emergency Management Agency supervisor Marn’i Washington, who told FEMA workers on the ground in Lake Placid, Florida, not to help households with Trump signs in the yard. Since then we’ve learned more. The problem wasn’t just a rogue supervisor.

The next day, the New York Post offered a juicy headline: “FEMA worker accused of telling staff to skip hurricane-ravaged Trump homes claims it was common practice: ‘This is not isolated.’”

The Post article relied heavily on an episode of the Roland S. Martin podcast on YouTube:

Her explanation may not be what you have seen reported, however. The idea at FEMA, Ms. Washington says, is a policy of “avoidance and de-escalation.” The trouble with Trump supporters, FEMA lore has it, is that they tend to be rude or otherwise resistant to FEMA help. So the agency, to avoid conflict, avoids some natural disaster victims as a policy. Washington says she did nothing wrong, or out of the ordinary.

FEMA is a controversial agency within the federal government, with a bad reputation amongst many Americans, not just Trump supporters. That hardly needs verification. Ms. Washington insists that the logs of FEMA workers will justify her claims.

“Donald Trump will be America’s 47th president,” explained CNN on Saturday, “after mounting the most momentous comeback in political history. . . .”

But is it?

Consider the three federal elections that 19th century Democratic politician Stephen Grover Cleveland participated in (winning two non-consecutive presidencies):

Note the course of Grover Cleveland’s three Electoral College returns: 219; 168; 277. Compare with Trump’s: 304; 232; 312*. Cleveland’s popular vote went up each time. Trump’s did too: 62,984,828; 74,223,975; 74,535,879*. You do the math, but it a quick look suggests that Trump’s comeback is no more momentous than Cleveland’s.

The real anomaly in the recent series of three elections was the whopping turnout for the 2020 outing, where Joe Biden, who did not engage in anything like a normal campaign, garnered a whopping 81,283,501 votes. Compare that to Hillary Clinton’s 65,853,514 votes in 2016 and the less-than 71 million votes for Kamala Harris in 2024.

The real question is what happened, in 2024, to 2020’s over ten million “eager” voters. The question may be easy to answer, but it is nevertheless a huge one, and has elicited a popular graph online, widely shared:

Note that it has at least one obvious inaccuracy: the Republican presidential vote did not go down from 2020 to 2024.

Also note that CNN, quoted above, characterized the election as one that “will hand [Trump] massive, disruptive power at home and will send shockwaves around the world.” Accurate, or just CNN being CNN?

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The asterisk, above, for 2024 returns is there to remind us that the election counts are not final.

In 2016, when Donald John Trump won the presidency in a squeaker election, major news media and the Deep State worked together to censor online and free speech in a big way, culminating in the election of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., in 2020. Now, in November 2024, with many millions fewer voting than for Biden, Trump wins handily, taking the swing states and achieving what looks like a popular vote majority.

So what are major news media mavens doing?

Complaining about a lack of censorship!

Well, some are. Specifically, as said on The View, “It would help if we could regulate social media, because one of the biggest offenders is D.C. and Congress have not been able to do one thing in regard to the rogue corporations of social media,” meaning, mainly but not exclusively, ex-Twitter/X.

There are many such laments out there. Just remember the Constitution of the United States, though:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

First Amendment, approved by Congress along with other amendments and submitted to the states for their ratification on September 25, 1789; ratified December 15, 1791.

Paul Jacob has covered online censorship extensively. Here are just a very few examples:

“Say No to Reich-Harris Reich,” September 6, 2024
“Censors Cancelled,” July 6, 2023
“Invitation to a Beheading,” March 13, 2023
“Buzz-Sawing the Conservatives Treehouse,” November 17, 2020

“The Puerto Rico trash problem has been growing for decades,” explained John Tarrantino on Wednesday, at The Environmental Blog. “With a population of around 3.2 million, the island generates about 3.7 million tons of waste yearly. Despite being small, the island’s landfills are full and there’s no proper recycling infrastructure. This trash crisis affects everything from health to the economy so solutions are crucial for Puerto Rico’s future.”

This, some have suggested, accounts for Tony Hinchcliffe’s infamous joke written about by Paul yesterday.

Does it make the “floating island of garbage” comment funny?

Puerto Ricans don’t seem to be laughing. But if Mr. Hinchcliffe gets invited to the island territory of the United States for a gig, we’ll reconsider.

NOTE: Puerto Rican resident and infamous investment advisor Peter Schiff has advice for voting next week:

“David Becker, who funneled millions of ‘Zuckbucks’ into the 2020 election, is super certain that former President Donald Trump will raise concerns about noncitizens voting in the 2024 election,” writes Logan Washburn at The Federalist. “And he’s even more certain he doesn’t want you paying attention when it happens.”

Washburn argues this is a strategy. “Becker claimed those with election integrity concerns about noncitizen voting — potentially a widespread issue entering November — are simply setting the stage for Trump to blame an election loss on noncitizens voting for Kamala Harris.”

But is it “simply”? Is the concern with non-citizens voting only an excuse for a Trump loss?

Readers of Common Sense with Paul Jacob are more than familiar with the reality of Democrat politicians and activists pushing for (and allowing) non-citizens to vote, and know the arguments against such a practice.

Could hyper-partisans like Becker have more on their minds?

You have to admit, though, that merely asking the question makes people’s heads hurt. Getting noncitizens in America to vote is bad itself, but accusing those interested in it only as preparing an excuse could itself be a cover-up-in advance for . . . an illegal election strategy? Or a way to focus on last time’s election rigging and gaming, but not this time? (Meaning, of course, not “a steal,” exactly, more like “underhandedly tilting.”)

Democrats’ fear of excuse making last month, when the article in The Federalist ran, and this month, when Donald Trump has leaped ahead in the polls, casts very different light on all such talk.

We might call the game “smug-upmanship,” where participants in a debate “fact-check” their opponents in the most smug way, pretending they have “the facts” on their side when, in reality, the facts are uncertain, filled with errors, or merely lies. In cases where the facts are dubious at best, the element of smugness helps. It’s a form of self-consciousness and -confidence. And when someone, in debate, exudes so much confidence in a fact or argument, and — during the course of the debate — you cannot readily demonstrate the opposite as true, it’s easy to be bowled over.

On July 30, in “Crime’s Ups and Downs,” Paul Jacob considered what became the Democrats’ smuggest fact-check of the year, the “fact” that the violent crime rate has gone down, not up. Trump said it was up. The FBI said it was down. End of debate?

Jacob Sullum at Reason repeated the Democrats’ take on “the facts,” blaming Trump for crime rising, briefly, on his watch. But Paul Jacob saw a few problems:

Crime spiked in the “Summer of Love” as a result of the mass protests against George Floyd’s death, the left’s demands to “defund the police,” and the climate of approved (“mostly peaceful”) violent riot. Trump’s enemies caused all this. Much of it may have been fueled by pandemic anxieties, but there was another factor: the Democrats’ anarcho-tyranny push to pry Trump out of office in annus horribilis 2020.

Since then crime, which is usually under-reported, now appears to be increasingly under-reported for systemic reasons. Some crimes, such as theft, have been demoted in the law books, allowing theft to run rampant in several major American cities — not just San Francisco — thereby disallowing the uptick in crime to even hit the stats.

What if bad data is the consequence of such policy? 

Meaning the perception of an increase in crime is true … at least in some places.

Paul Jacob, “Crime’s Ups and Downs,” July 30, 2024.

Well, now the stats have been revised. 

John R. Lott, Jr., argues in his Real Clear Investigations exposé “Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Revises Violent Crime Stats,” that the initial report of 2.1 percent drop in crime in 2022 depended entirely on under-reporting by cities of actual crimes — and the FBI not adequately figuring for the lack of data. And then not telling us even as it has later accounted for the actual data:

[T]he FBI has quietly revised those numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%. The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.

The Bureau — which has been at the center of partisan storms — made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release. 

RCI discovered the change through a cryptic reference on the FBI website that states: “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” But there is no mention that the numbers increased. One only sees the change by downloading the FBI’s new crime data and comparing it to the file released last year.

John R. Lott, Jr., “Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Revises Violent Crime Stats,” Real Clear Investigations, October 16, 2024.

The FBI may have merely erred in its initial report — though that’s unlikely — but it lied in the correction, failing to disclose the magnitude of the original error. The correction was a cover-up.

The Democrats, for their part, engaged in typical smug rhetoric.

And Reason got the chance to stick it, once again, to Donald Trump. 

But this seems clear: anyone with a nose for how governments lie, routinely and in partisan fashion, should have caught at least a whiff of this.

You might think that if they wish to provide for secure elections, you’d set up security systems, including poll-watchers and other election inspectors, sticking rigorously to every last quantum of punctilio towards the law.

You might think that if they wish to rig and game elections, they wouldn’t be sloppy on election security, trying hard to appear to seek election integrity.

But in Detroit, Michigan, a court has sided with the Republican National Committee, and other aggrieved parties, who had sued the city in August, “alleging that it violated state law that requires election officials to hire an equal number of poll workers on both sides of the political aisle,” according to The Epoch Times. “The city, the lawsuit alleges, hired seven times as many Democrats as Republicans, which the RNC said decreases public trust in elections.”

According to the complaint, the Republican Party nominated 675 election inspectors; however, the city only appointed 52 for the primary election.

The city hired up to 250 Republicans who weren’t nominated by the RNC, leaving a ratio of seven Democrats to one Republican inspector, which the RNC said was “not even close to equal.”

In comparison, the city hired more than 2,300 election inspectors from the Democratic Party. 

“This uneven distribution of poll workers not only breaches state law but also undermines the integrity and fairness of the electoral process,” the RNC said in the August press release. “Our lawsuit demands that Detroit appoint more Republican inspectors.”

Matt McGregor, “Michigan Republicans Win Election Integrity Lawsuit Over Number of Poll Workers,” The Epoch Times (October 12, 2024).

After losing the lawsuit, the city responded with the usual blather.

In “Trump Vows to End Double Taxation for Overseas Americans,” Tom Ozimek begums by focusing on that title idea, promising to end double taxation on expatriates and encouraging expatriates to vote. But before the reader of The Epoch Times can reflect on foundational notions linking taxation and representation, the article moves to more interesting territory: tariff hikes.

While Trump has not released a detailed tax plan as part of his campaign for the White House, he has floated some tax policy proposals, including extending the expiring 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) changes, exempting tips and overtime pay from tax, and leaning heavily into tariffs to support U.S. manufacturing.

The “leaning heavily into tariffs” program is one of the 45th President’s oldest obsessions, and it is always worth remembering that tariffs are a form of taxation. Harder to remember, but always important, are the lessons of classical political economy, which explained that a tariff is not a tax that “foreigners” pay: as economists put it, the incidence of the tax shifts onto the consumers residing within the “protected” boundaries of the state imposing the tariff. Basically, a tariff is a tax that consumers pay. No wonder such taxes are promoted by a few affected producers and laborers in the industry so protected, on the understandable rationale that tariffs effectively transfer wealth from the general mass of consumers to specific sets of producers.

Thus they work by the same political logic that most government interventions do, by focusing on the beneficiaries of the policies (a concentrated few) and taking attention away from those who bear the burden of the policies (the dispersed many).

At the Detroit event, the former president took aim at Chinese auto manufacturers building auto plants in Mexico with plans to export those vehicles to the United States.

“I will impose whatever tariffs are required, 100 percent, 200 percent 1,000 percent,” he said. “They are not going to sell any cars into the United States with those plants.”

It is pure demagoguery. But effective, especially if you fall for the encouragement of empathy for the concentrated (and much-ballyhooed) batch of beneficiaries while giving no thought to all the consumers harmed.