Patrick Pleul/DPA via ZUMA

Our story so far:

Republican Deficit Hawks: We won’t vote for the tax bill if it increases the deficit.

GOP Leadership: No problem. Lower taxes will supercharge the economy so much that it will cause revenue to go up. The tax bill will actually cut the deficit!

RDH: Uh huh. Can we have that in writing?

GOPL: Sorry, no time for that. We need to pass this bill now now now.

RDH: Well then, we want a trigger. If the economy doesn’t skyrocket, taxes will automatically go back up.

GOPL: Um, OK. Hold on a sec.

Joint Committee on Taxation: Hey, look! We burnt the candle at both ends and got the deficit projection done! It’s gonna be a trillion dollars.

GOPL: Sigh.

RDH: Now we really need that trigger.

GOPL: Don’t panic. We can work something out.

And here’s the latest:

A visibly frustrated Corker, normally a cheerful man, tells us: “My understanding is, that the parliamentarian has ruled against (a trigger) so they’re just going to automatically put it in, period.”

— Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) November 30, 2017

Oof. The parliamentarian. Apparently she ruled that a trigger doesn’t affect the budget, something that’s required for every provision of a reconciliation bill. That actually strikes me as odd, but there must be some subtlety here that I’m missing.

So now the plan is to simply build tax increases directly into the bill. Maybe the corporate tax rate starts at 20 percent, and then goes up to 21 percent in 2020, 22 percent in 2022, etc. However, there are two problems with this. The first is that the militant tax cutters won’t like it. The second is that since JCT has finally produced a dynamic score for the tax bill, it means they have their models all set up. It would only take them a few hours to plug in new tax rates and produce a new deficit projection. And I’ll bet that a couple of points here and there won’t be enough to make much difference. The deficit will still be in the arena of a trillion dollars.

It’s always something, isn’t it? But that’s what happens when you base legislation on a fundamental lie. It doesn’t mean the sausage can’t be passed, but it does mean that occasionally you’ll run into people who need theirs grilled well done, not raw.

Republicans in Congress were desperately hoping that the Joint Committee on Taxation wouldn’t have time to perform a dynamic estimate of their tax bill before they passed it. But the JCT wonks put in some overtime and got the job done. Yay wonks! Here’s the result:

• Over ten years, the tax bill will increase the deficit by $1 trillion rather than $1.4 trillion.

This means that the deficit hawks no longer have any excuse for pretending that the tax cut will supercharge the economy so much it will pay for itself. JCT applied the dynamic fairy dust, but it was nowhere near enough.

As for growth, Republicans were going around saying that all they needed was 0.4 percent higher GDP each year and everything would be great. JCT projects instead that the bill will increase GDP by a little less than 0.1 percent each year.¹

I doubt that this means the bill is in danger of not passing. It just means the deficit hawks have to come up with a different excuse for voting for it.

¹I think. The actual JCT wording is that the tax bill would increase output “by 0.8 percent on average throughout the ten-year budget window.” This is oddly ambiguous. It obviously doesn’t mean 0.8 percent per year, but neither does it mean that GDP is 0.8 percent bigger by the end of ten years (“the increase in output is expected to be smaller towards the end of the budget window”). Truthfully, I’m not really sure precisely what it means, but I think it probably translates into roughly the equivalent of an additional growth of about 0.1 percent per year.

Times like this call for poetry. I’ve got you covered:

Fall’s pall: small blue balls
Pray for winter’s warmth to come
In twenty-twenty

See, it’s a metaphor. Or maybe an allegory. And it’s about stuff that’s dying—which could be either your hope for a better future or maybe just an ingrown toenail. The small blue balls are right there in the picture, and they’re dying because it’s autumn. But there’s a deeper meaning! Blue is the color for Democrats and also the color for sadness. Democrats are feeling small and sad right now. So they’re waiting for winter’s warmth. But winter isn’t warm, is it? That’s where the old haiku juxtaposition switcheroo comes in: sure, winter is cold, but for our allegorically sad Democrats, winter of 2020 could turn out to be very warm indeed.

As for why the Democrats are apparently represented by balls in this imagery, I’ll leave that up to you. I mean, do I have to explain everything? Are you feeling inspired yet?

Via email, Avalere Health sends me their latest estimate of the growth of narrow networks on Obamacare. These are networks like HMOs or EPOs (Exclusive Provider Organizations) that allow you to choose only a limited range of doctors and hospitals. Here’s the chart:

Note that this is only for the federal exchange, but there’s no reason to think that things are especially different on the state exchanges. Avalere also reports that deductibles have gone up for silver plans, but not for the other metal levels.

The Regional Plan Association has made some suggestions for improving the New York city subway. Justin Davidson reports:

Much of what the RPA suggests is sensible: Install glass doors at the edge of subway platforms so 50 people a year can’t tumble onto the tracks and die.

The consensus seems to be that about 15 of these deaths are suicides. So that’s about 35 people who fall onto the tracks and die either accidentally or from being pushed. But I was curious: how does that compare, say, to London’s Underground, which is roughly the same size and also has no safety barriers? Apparently the answer for London is zero. However, they do seem to rack up about 25 successful suicides per year.

This seems very peculiar, no? If a few minutes of googling is to be believed, New York’s subway is responsible for 35 falls and 15 suicides per year, while London’s is responsible for zero falls but 25 suicides. Surely this can’t be right? Are the two cities really that different?

The Wall Street Journal is breathless yet again because the Dow has crossed another threshold with three zeroes in it:

Just 30 days! Of course, that’s how things go with an exponential series: the time between fixed intervals gets smaller and smaller. For your viewing pleasure, then, here’s a less dramatic take on the stock market over the past seven years:

There you have it. This is not the Dow, it’s the S&P 500—which is a better measure—but they’re pretty much the same. The market has been growing at a fairly steady 11 percent per year ever since the Great Recession ended. There’s really nothing very special going on right now. In case you’re interested, here’s the P/E ratio since 2004:

It’s starting to look a little pricey. The last two recessions began when the P/E ratio was at 26.1 (March 2001) and 22.4 (December 2007). It’s currently at 25.5

Dana Nessell, a Democratic candidate for attorney general in Michigan, has a unique idea for taking advantage of the current deluge of sexual harassment revelations among entertainers and politicians. This is a real ad:

This comes via Amanda Terkel at HuffPost. She’s got the whole video there.

Dinendra Haria/Rex Shutterstock via ZUMA

Um…

The White House has developed a plan to force out Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, whose relationship with President Trump has been strained, and replace him with Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director, within the next several weeks, senior administration officials said on Thursday. Mr. Pompeo would be replaced at the C.I.A. by Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas who has been a key ally of the president on national security matters.

Pompeo has mainly distinguished himself by being the most political CIA chief in recent history, but I suppose if you’re going to be openly political you might as well be in an explicitly political job like Secretary of State. As for Cotton, he strikes me as pretty inexperienced to be head of the CIA, but who knows?

Of the major players in the Trump administration when it began, this would mean that Trump has lost or fired: Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Mike Flynn, and Rex Tillerson. Of the original campaign crew, only Jared Kushner and Jeff Sessions are left, and both seem to be on thin ice these days.

But don’t worry. Things are going great. Like a Swiss watch.

This is literally apropos of nothing. I happened to get pointed to a Ross Douthat tweetstorm about declining fertility rates, and it made me curious about what our fertility rate actually looks like. So here it is:

I really have nothing at all to say about this. As it turns out, our fertility rate did start dropping during the Great Recession. It seemed like it was flattening out around 2013, but then it started declining again. Does this matter? Is it a blip, or a sign of problems to come? Does it mean we need more immigrants? Should I even care if our population is going to start shrinking a few decades from now? Robots are going to be running the whole planet by then, after all. It all beats me. But at least now you know what the basic shape of the water is.

After briefly dropping in the polls following sexual misconduct allegations, Roy Moore is once again leading Doug Jones in the Alabama race for senator. Naturally this reminds me of an old Doonesbury cartoon:¹

The flip side of this, of course, is that bad news can be disclosed too soon. After a month or two, supporters have had plenty of time to get over their shock and start inventing reasons why they really need to vote for the cretin anyway.

Of course, this cartoon is from 1976. In the internet age, everything has been speeded up by a factor of two or three. One week was plenty of time for James Comey’s letter to kill Hillary Clinton, while four weeks was way more than enough time for Donald Trump’s supporters to rationalize away the Access Hollywood tape. If the Washington Post had really been on a political vendetta against Roy Moore, they would have run their story right about him now, not three weeks ago.

¹Just as there’s a Trump tweet for everything, there’s an old Doonesbury cartoon for everything.