This popped up in my Twitter feed this morning:

This is totally true. Yesterday I noted that Bernie Sanders had urged Trump to deny federal contracts to companies that move jobs overseas, which I called a massive abuse of power. I got some pushback on that, along the lines of “Why shouldn’t a president stand up for American workers?”

Well, a president should. But a president shouldn’t personally punish companies that do things he doesn’t like. I hope that requires no explanation. Now, if Congress passes a law banning federal contracts for companies that engage in some specified form of job offshoring, that would be different. It would almost certainly be a very bad law, but I’m pretty sure it would be constitutional. And if it allowed the executive branch a certain amount of discretion in enforcing the law, then Trump could take advantage of that.

I would not recommend doing this. But it would be legal. Until then, however, it wouldn’t be. And it would be wrong. Let’s not encourage Trump to think of himself as any more of a mafia kingpin than he already does.

I got showered with comments yesterday about the Big Mac. It’s so much more than the middle bun, you cretin! Even my sister got on my case about it. My sister!

So today I went out to our newly refurbished McDonald’s and got one. My conclusion: it was fine. The special sauce was fine, the pickles were fine, and it was a perfectly good hamburger on the McDonald’s scale of hamburgers. About halfway through eating it, though, it suddenly occurred to me that…it sure had a lot of bread. But all of you Big Mac lovers like the extra bun, I guess. De gustibus.

I haven’t been to McDonald’s in a long time, and I see that they now hand out numbers like most other places. Unlike other places, however, mine has a staff that comes by and takes your number from the table without leaving any food. It took a while to sort this out, so I used the time to load Facebook on my phone. I did this because apparently blog posts with inline images (like the one on the right) don’t render very well in Facebook Instant, whatever that is. And since half our traffic now comes from mobile Facebook users, this is a problem.

So I got the Facebook app loaded and then scrolled through my feed, but there was nothing of mine there. Hmmm. I’ve never paid much attention to Facebook, so I wasn’t sure what to do. I searched for MoJo, and then liked it, figuring that might make MoJo content appear. Oddly, though, what it mostly did was make lots of Brad DeLong posts appear. What’s going on up there at Cal? I got this sorted out eventually, but it turns out the MoJo digital team has been curating the feed so that the troublesome posts don’t go up. So I still don’t know quite what’s going on. But I’ll find out soon enough when I chat with our web folks.

That was my midday. How was yours?

The Washington Post says Donald Trump will pick Gen. James Mattis as his Secretary of Defense. I gather Mattis is pretty well respected, though I continue to believe that Trump himself was swayed solely by his “Mad Dog” nickname.

Mattis will need a special exemption from Congress, since he’s only been retired from the military for three years rather than the legally required seven. That will probably sail through, though I sort of hope it runs into at least a few bumps. I don’t have anything against Mattis, but the 7-year rule is a pretty good one. Civilian control of the military is an important tradition.

According to Paul Ryan, he has six top priorities for the upcoming year:

Regulatory relief….Obamacare relief….reforming the tax code….foreign policy, rebuilding the military….securing the border….And then while we work on that, we want to work on poverty and restoring our constitutional separation of powers….So those are effectively the six pieces that we’ve been talking about.

I have a couple of comments about this. First, there’s nothing here about entitlement reform, or Medicare reform in particular. This doesn’t mean Medicare is safe forever, but it does suggest it’s not a briar patch Ryan wants to jump in right away.

Second, these are all really, really complex. Regulatory relief—whatever that actually means—is dauntingly complicated. Repealing Obamacare is all but impossible without Democratic support, which means months or years of negotiation. Tax cuts are easy, but Ryan seems to want wholesale tax reform on the 1986 model, which has a ton of moving parts. Securing the border is a lot more than just building a wall. And “working on poverty”—I shudder to think what he means by this—is obviously no cakewalk.

On the bright side, rebuilding the military is fairly easy. You just give them more money and hope it doesn’t go down a rat hole.

If Ryan is serious about this stuff, he’s mapped out two years of work already—and that’s not even counting whatever Donald Trump wants to throw in the mix. Put it all together, stir in Trump’s promise not to touch entitlements, and I suspect that we’re not going to see any serious movement on Medicare for at least a year, maybe more.

The Wall Street Journal passes along the latest news on the Carrier deal:

Indiana officials agreed to give United Technologies Corp. $7 million worth of tax breaks over 10 years to encourage the company’s Carrier Corp. unit to keep about 1,000 jobs in the state, according to people familiar with the matter….The deal would cover 800 Carrier workers from the Indianapolis furnace plant and an additional 300 research and headquarters positions that weren’t slated to go to Mexico, according to another person briefed on the deal.

Two things. First, we’re now down to 800 jobs saved. The other 300 weren’t going to Mexico in the first place, while another thousand are still scheduled to head south of the border. Second, this comes to about $1,000 annually per job saved. As these kinds of deals go, that’s not too bad.

However! Keep your eyes open. Call me cynical if you want, but I have a feeling it might eventually turn out that Carrier got a few more tidbits out of Trump than just this.

Back in October, when Democrats were in charge of the White House and seemed set to continue that, 32 percent of Americans said they wanted to repeal Obamacare. After the election, when Republicans had won total control of everything, that number dropped sharply to 26 percent. Here are the results of the latest Kaiser tracking poll:

Apparently, when repeal of Obamacare became a concrete reality, rather than just a rallying cry, a fair number of people started to think twice. Even among Trump voters, only half want to see the law repealed.

In any case, Democrats have a secret weapon to rescue Obamacare—one that’s hiding in plain sight. More on that later.

Seriously. Do it now.

Over at the Washington Post, Chris Cillizza presents a chart showing the dismal fortunes of the Democratic Party in recent years:

But 2008 was a landslide year for Democrats. Of course they’ll look bad if you start from there. If, instead, you start at 1994—the post-Gingrich era—and eliminate the 2008 results, you get this:¹

Neither of these charts is “correct.” What’s more, both show that 2016 was, indeed, a fairly dismal year for Democrats, especially at the state level. Still, it matters where you start. If your starting point is a landslide year, things are automatically going to look bleak. But if you expand your vision to the past two decades, 2016 looks bad, but it’s not an epic disaster.

2016 was a pretty good year for Republicans. But that’s all.

¹For the record, I cobbled together these numbers from several sources, and they may be off slightly. But they show the trend accurately.

Earlier this evening I promised more on the TIMSS math test, and now I’m here to deliver. I could pretty easily just copy the full ranking table and consider it a job well done, but there’s a problem with that: a bunch of Asian tigers are always at the top, light years ahead of everyone else. There’s not much point in comparing ourselves to them. Do we really care that we do worse than countries that goad their kids into studying math until their eyes fall out? Likewise, there are lots of poor countries clustered near the bottom. There’s not much point in comparing ourselves to them either. It might make us feel good, but do we really care that we beat out Malaysia and Oman?

Really, what we want to know is how we compare to peer countries. We also want to know if we’re improving over time. So without further ado, here’s the answer for 8th graders:

Basically, this isn’t bad. We do pretty well among our peers, and our scores have been improving steadily for the past two decades. The full report is here, and it has lots of interesting tidbits.

It’s worth noting that there are two big international math tests: TIMSS and PISA. The United States usually does fairly well on TIMSS and not so well on PISA, which claims to be more about concepts and actual problem solving. If your ideological preference is to show that American kids are doing fine, you’ll focus on TIMSS. If your ideological preference is to show that American education is a cesspool and needs massive reform, you’ll focus on PISA. Take your pick.

One other note. If you really want a takeaway from the latest TIMSS test, it’s the same as the takeaway from every other test ever administered to America schoolkids: we do a terrible job of educating black children. The single biggest thing we could do to improve education in this country is to cut out the half measures and focus serious money and resources on poor, black school districts. But I guess the white working class wouldn’t be very happy about that.

Yesterday I warned everyone to keep an eye out for details about the size of the bribe that Carrier got from Donald Trump to stay in Indiana. We still don’t know that, but we do know a little bit more:

Carrier, the company that changed its plans to shutter a plant in Indianapolis and shift production to Mexico after talks with President-elect Donald Trump, confirmed Wednesday that it would receive financial assistance from the state of Indiana as part of the deal to keep the plant open.

….A statement from the company…“The incentives offered by the state were an important consideration.” The Indiana Economic Development Corp., a state agency, will grant Carrier a tax break in exchange for keeping the plant open, said John Mutz, a member of the corporation’s board and a former lieutenant governor.

How big a tax break? And what else will Carrier get? Stay tuned as we learn more details about how many taxpayer dollars are being spent in order to provide Donald Trump with a PR opportunity.