It looks like rough weather ahead for Great Britain.Kevin Drum

The EU has spoken: They will not grant a short Brexit extension unless Britain approves the deal negotiated by Theresa May.

So that’s that. Approve the deal or crash out of the EU in nine days. This should certainly get everyone’s attention, shouldn’t it?

UPDATE: Apparently there is still the possibility of a long extension if May’s deal isn’t approved:

Brussels expects the British government to request a lengthy extension, and hold European elections, if the deal fails in the Commons at the third time of asking, so as to allow time for cross-party talks on a soft Brexit or a general election or second referendum.

….EU diplomats had been led to believe by May’s de facto deputy, David Lidington, who was in Brussels on Tuesday, that the British government would be seeking a lengthy extension with an option to leave after three months should the deal pass. After a stormy cabinet meeting, however, a letter from Downing Street did not appear overnight as had been expected. When it did emerge there was a sole request of a extension until 30 June to provide time for withdrawal legislation to be passed should the main deal be backed.

Hmmm. The EU “had been led to believe” that Britain might ask for a long extension, and presumably the EU would accept this if asked. But no one has asked. So I guess the long extension is still on the table, though only barely.

Speaking of the Trump administration’s inability to get anything done because they don’t understand the law, today brings yet another example:

A federal judge ruled late Tuesday that the Interior Department violated federal law by failing to take into account the climate impact of its oil and gas leasing in the West.

The decision by U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Rudolph Contreras marks the first time the Trump administration has been held to account for the climate impact of its energy-dominance agenda, and it could have sweeping implications for the president’s plan to boost fossil fuel production across the country. Contreras concluded that Interior’s Bureau of Land Management “did not sufficiently consider climate change” when making decisions to auction off federal land in Wyoming to oil and gas drilling. The judge temporarily blocked drilling on roughly 300,000 acres of land in the state.

….While the Interior Department began to take into account the climate impacts of federal oil, gas and coal leasing toward the end of President Obama’s second term, Trump administration officials jettisoned those plans right after President Trump took office. Trump and several of his top deputies have dismissed recent federal findings that the United States and other countries must curb their carbon output in the next decade or face potentially disastrous consequences from climate change.

You see what happened? The Obama folks took a long time to put new policies in place, but that’s because they followed the rules. They got sued anyway, and who knows? Maybe they would have lost. However, the Trumpies just casually dumped Obama’s policies, which goes over well with big donors and the Republican base but guarantees a loss in court because it’s illegal. This is why Obama said, as he was leaving office, that his legacy might be a wee bit harder to kill off than Trump thought.

UPDATE: I changed the final paragraph to make it clear that the lawsuit was originally against the Obama administration. However, it was defended in court by the Trump administration.

Via Tyler Cowen, here are the results of “The Complex Relation Between Receptivity to Pseudo-Profound Bullshit and Political Ideology,” a recently published paper:

Among Swedish adults (N = 985), bullshit receptivity was (a) robustly positively associated with socially conservative (vs. liberal) self-placement, resistance to change, and particularly binding moral intuitions (loyalty, authority, purity); (b) associated with centrism on preference for equality and even leftism (when controlling for other aspects of ideology) on economic ideology self-placement; and (c) lowest among right-of-center social liberal voters and highest among left-wing green voters.

I don’t have access to the finished paper, but here are the main findings from a preprint version:

For some reason, “bullshit receptivity” is reversed in the chart, so lower numbers mean a higher affinity for bullshit. In Sweden, at least, the lowest tolerance for bullshit is clearly in the center: the two most centrist partisan categories have high reasoning abilities, excellent sensitivity to bullshit, and very low tolerance for it.

The highest tolerance for bullshit is among Greens and two of the right-wing parties. The far left and social democrats are about average.

What I was most curious about, however, was how the authors identified bullshit. It turns out there’s considerable prior research on this, but the paper provides one example:

We measured bullshit receptivity and profoundness receptivity by asking participants to rate the meaningfulness and profundity of seven bullshit statements (e.g., “Your movement transforms universal observations”) and seven genuine aphorisms (e.g., “Your teacher can open the door, but you have to step in”) respectively on a Likert response bar ranging from 1 (not at all meaningful) to 6 (very meaningful).

I guess that sounds reasonable, although seven statements seems a little thin. Still, I’d count this as a big win for centrists. Maybe they have more going for them than we partisan types care to admit?

Donald Trump seems to believe that presidents are allowed to change policies with the stroke of a pen. They aren’t. Longstanding law requires that changes can’t be arbitrary or capricious, which means the executive branch has to explain why they’re changing things. As the Washington Post documents today, Trump still hasn’t gotten the message:

Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration at least 63 times over the past two years, an extraordinary record of legal defeat that has stymied large parts of the president’s agenda on the environment, immigration and other matters.

….The normal “win rate” for the government in such cases is about 70 percent, according to analysts and studies. But as of mid-January, a database maintained by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law shows Trump’s win rate at about 6 percent.

Seth Jaffe, a Boston-based environmental lawyer who represents corporations and had been looking forward to deregulation, said the administration has failed to deliver….Some errors are so basic that Jaffe said he has to wonder whether agency officials are more interested in announcing policy shifts than in actually implementing them. “It’s not just that they’re losing. But they’re being so nuts about it,” he said, adding that the losses in court have “set regulatory reform back for a period of time.”

If I had a choice, I’d still choose a normal Republican like Mike Pence or Ted Cruz over Donald Trump. However, a normal Republican would also have hired normal aides who understood the legal rules governing deregulation and would have been far more successful at pressing his agenda. Trump is so incompetent he can’t get anything done. If there’s a silver lining to his presidency, that’s it.

The 2018 edition of the General Social Survey is out, so I thought I’d browse through it and look for something interesting. How about this?

Overall, support for legalizing marijuana has gone up from 16 percent in the early 90s to 62 percent in 2018. No real surprise there. But the fastest growth has been in the Midwest. In 1991 only 12 percent of folks in the heartland wanted to legalize marijuana, the lowest rate in the country. In 2018 that jumped to 69 percent, the highest in the country.

Why the big jump in the past two years? It could be an artifact, but the GSS has a pretty big sample size, so it’s probably legit. In the last decade, support for legalizing marijuana has gone up 36 points in the Midwest. In every other region, the increase has been only 22-25 points. Something is going on.

POSTSCRIPT: If you feel like browsing the latest GSS data yourself, you can access a lot of it via the GSS Data Explorer.

President Trump’s illustrious Council of Economic Advisers issued its annual report today. But you have to go to page 527 to find the straight dope:

As illustrated in figure 10-16…the Administration anticipates economic growth to remain at or above 3.0 percent through 2023, assuming full implementation of the economic agenda detailed in this Report and its predecessor. We expect near-term growth to be supported by the continuing effects of the TCJA, discussed in chapter 1, as well as new measures to promote increased labor force participation and deregulatory actions, discussed in chapters 3 and 2, and an infrastructure program, discussed in chapter 4 of the 2018 Economic Report of the President, which we assume will commence in 2019 with observable effects on output beginning in 2020.

Hmmm. Let’s take a look at figure 10-16, shall we?

For now, ignore the fact that GDP growth in 2018 was 2.9 percent, not 3.1 percent, if you measure it the way everyone else does. Instead, concentrate your attention on the red line, which projects real GDP growth under “current law.” It shows GDP growth of only 2.6 percent by 2021, declining to barely overy 2 percent by 2026. What happened to 3 percent growth?

Funny thing about that. It turns out that Trump’s advisers have a new story for us: We could have 3 percent growth, but only if we pass a new tax cut and a big infrastructure bill and a bunch of deregulation of big business and some new labor policies. Oh, and all this stuff has to be passed in the next nine months. If it’s not, then economic growth will plummet and it will all be the fault of Democrats.

I’m glad we finally got that straight. So here’s my projection: GDP growth this year and next will clock in at around 2 percent if we’re lucky, and none of Trump’s fantasies about infrastructure or taxes or anything else will have any effect on that. We’ve already gotten one tax cut for the rich, and it appears to have produced a small bump in 2018 growth and then petered out. Everyone knows it will have no further effect, even if the fantasist-in-chief insists otherwise.

I drove up Ortega Highway yesterday for reasons I’ll tell you about someday, but I missed my exit and ended up driving nearly out to Lake Elsinore. As you may know, Lake Elsinore is the site of our latest superbloom, which created traffic jams 20 miles long over the weekend. I had no intention of going anywhere near it—and no interest in the superbloom anyway—so I was taken by surprise when I looked out my window and suddenly got a look at it.

I’m here to tell you that it was breathtaking. I was about 2,000 feet up and a few miles away, and the view was just stunning. As a camera guy I rarely say this, but pictures don’t do it justice. In real life it’s far more impressive than any pictures I’ve seen.

Needless to say, this didn’t stop me from taking lots of pictures anyway. In fact, I took so many that I’m going to share no fewer than five superbloom pictures with you today. First off, here’s a wide panorama of the entire vista from the Ortega Highway:

Panoramic shots don’t work too well in the limited space of this blog, so here’s another one that’s been cropped more tightly:

Here’s a closeup—which is to say, a telephoto shot of the hillside:

Here’s another closeup of a hillside covered not just in golden poppies, but also some kind of yellow plant. Maybe mustard?

Finally, here’s my favorite, a shot of the superbloom with some snowy peaks in the background:

This is almost certainly not the superbloom at its photographic best, since these pictures were taken when the sun was high in the sky. I’m tempted to go back later this week in the early morning, but I suspect I won’t get around to it.

Nathalie Loiseau hurries to hide from the press after investigative reporter forces her to admit she LIED about having a cat.Panoramic via ZUMA

From Nathalie Loiseau, France’s Europe minister:

J’ai fini par appeler mon chat Brexit. Il me réveille en miaulant à la mort parce qu’il veut sortir, et dès que je lui ouvre la porte, il reste planté au milieu, indécis, et il me jette un regard noir quand je le mets dehors.

Here’s the translation:

I ended up calling my cat Brexit. He wakes me up meowing to death because he wants to go out, and as soon as I open the door to him he stays planted in the middle, undecided, and he glares at me when I put him out.

She later explained that “I think I need to have a certain sense of humor to deal with Brexit.” It turns out she doesn’t even have a cat. For shame.

For many years, Republican primaries have been dominated by contests over who can produce the most ridiculously wealth-friendly tax cut with little concern over cost. It appears that this year’s Democratic primary is starting to move in the same direction, with candidates competing over who can propose the most comprehensive list of left-friendly programs with little concern over cost.

Maybe this is fine. In real life, it’s not much more meaningful than all those tax cut plans. It’s just a way of showing where your heart is, not a serious attempt to suggest that all this stuff is going to be enacted.

But there are some big-picture restraints that are still worth considering for those of us who continue to consider ourselves reality based. Let’s start with current government spending:

• Federal: $4.5 trillion
• State and local: $3.0 trillion
• Total government spending: $7.5 trillion

Now let’s add in Medicare for All, since it’s a point of virtually unanimous agreement on the left. Various levels of government already account for about 45 percent of all health care expenditures, so let’s assume we can take over that pot of money and need to find funding only for the balance:

• Total health care spending: $3.5 trillion
• Current government share: $1.6 trillion
• Total net cost of M4A: $1.9 trillion

Now, I know that you all have brilliant plans for how M4A will save money, which means we won’t actually have to spend that full $1.9 trillion. But this is mostly a pipe dream. For now, then, let’s stick with the full figure. This means that total government spending, once we add M4A, comes to about $9.4 trillion.

American GDP last year clocked in at a hair over $20 trillion. So current spending plus M4A comes to 46 percent of GDP.

I don’t know about you, but this is roughly the highest number I’m comfortable with. There are a few countries that spend more, but 46 percent is the EU average and seems like a reasonable ceiling, especially since we’ll almost certainly drift higher than this as health care and retirement costs increase.¹

So here’s my question: if you want lots of other goodies, there are two choices. First, reduce other spending to make room. Second, don’t worry about that 46 percent total spending number. It’s just centrist rubbish anyway.

So which is it?

¹Don’t worry about taxes. For the purposes of this exercise, just assume that we impose taxes of some kind that amount to about 45 percent of GDP. You may imagine them to be as progressive as you wish.

Alex Edelman/ZUMA

From CNN:

Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is joining the board of the newly slimmed-down Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News. Ryan and three other board of directors were appointed on Tuesday….The Ryan appointment is the most noteworthy, given his history near the top of Republican politics.

Yes indeed. Who would ever have expected that a lifelong stone Republican would be invited onto the board of a legitimate news organization that’s totally not a propaganda arm of any political party? Truly, it’s a shocker.