In the past, I have whined at great length about the fact that most new chip-based credit cards are chip-and-signature. This is both insecure—anyone can scrawl a signature—and incompatible with card readers in Europe. But the boffins who run our banks figured that Americans were too dumb to remember a PIN for their credit cards, so chip-and-signature it was.

However, my Wells Fargo debit card claims to be chip-and-PIN. Is it really? Today at the supermarket, a little sign told me that their card reader now accepts chip-based cards. So I stuck in my debit card. A few seconds later it asked for my PIN. Be still my heart! I entered it, and the transaction was approved.

So I can now report definitively that at least one debit card is true chip-and-PIN. And quite handily, the PIN is the same as the PIN for getting cash from the ATM, so it’s easy to remember. Thanks, Wells Fargo!

If you want to understand how politicians manipulate today’s media environment, there are only three numbers you need to know:

• Detroit debate viewership (TV plus streaming): 20 million
• Daytime cable news viewership: 1-2 million
• Print newspaper viewership: 1 million max

The last number is a guesstimate for the number of people who will see Donald Trump’s statement announcing that he’s had a change of heart about ordering the US military to torture prisoners. If anything, it’s generous. A printed statement just isn’t going to make the rounds much. Nor is it going to be a big deal on social media, especially among the Trump demographic.

So here’s what you get:

• When Bret Baier asks Trump what would happen if the military refuses his order to torture prisoners, 20 million people hear and see him say, “They won’t refuse….I’ve never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they’re going to do it.”
• The next day, 2-3 million people read (or hear a network anchor recite) a bloodless statement that says, “I do, however, understand that the United States is bound by laws and treaties and I will not order our military or other officials to violate those laws and will seek their advice on such matters.”

The arithmetic here is pretty simple. There are at least 17 million people who hear Trump insist that he’s going to torture “these animals over in the Middle East” and never see the retraction. For Trump, this is a double win. His base continues to think he’s a tough guy. Elites breathe a small sigh of relief and figure that maybe this means Trump will calm down and listen to his advisors if he wins the presidency.

The exact numbers can vary, but the basic math plays out the same way all the time. Politicians have learned that they can lie without consequence. They tell the lie on television, where lots of people see it, and then count on virtually nobody seeing the earnest fact checks the next day.

Among younger voters, you probably have to factor in social media as well. But you also have to factor in the well-known evidence that fact checks rarely change anyone’s mind. Welcome to 21st century America.

UPDATE: There’s another piece of this that’s worth mentioning. Trump’s retraction was given to the Wall Street Journal, so naturally they’re playing it big on their front page. But I just checked USA Today, Fox, MSNBC, the LA Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and none of them have so much as mentioned this on their home pages. This is not a coincidence. They hate having to acknowledge a competitor, and that causes them to downplay the news.

The one exception is CNN, which has plastered it at the top of their home page and mentioned it repeatedly on air. I don’t quite know why they’re the exception.

Check out Hilbert’s package. That is one virile cat. And ladies, he knows how to treat you right. Have I ever mentioned that Hilbert has big paws, too?

California’s bullet train gets more appealing with every new business plan:

California will need to double down on support of the bullet train by digging deeper into the state’s wallet and accepting a three-year delay in completing the project’s initial leg, a new business plan for the 220-mph system shows.

….The new plan calls for completion of the entire system by 2029, one year later than under the old business plan. Once the initial system starts showing a profit, the business plan asserts, private investors would jump in with an estimated $21 billion, based on financial calculations.

….The 99-page plan and its backup technical documents again raise questions about service and speed. A sample operating schedule does not show any nonstop trains between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The fastest travel time between the cities would be 3 hours and 14 minutes, not the 2 hours and 40 minutes many people expect.

Yes, I’m sure private investors will be panting to invest, just like they’ve invested so much in iffy high-speed rail construction elsewhere in the world. They’ll be especially eager in another few years, when this project will undoubtedly be forecast to open around 2040 or so, and estimates of LA-SF travel time will be four hours. Who could say no?

I get requests from time to time:

@kdrum Can you please update and reprint your list of all the things going great in America?

— Eggman (@IamZeeEggman) March 4, 2016

I can do better than that. How about a top ten list of all the things going well in America right now?

1. Unemployment = 4.9 percent. By virtually every measure, more people are re-entering the labor force and more people are finding work.
2. Inflation = 1.4 percent. The annual inflation rate for food is 0.8 percent.
3. Economic growth = 2.4 percent. This could be better, but it’s not bad: the US economy is stronger than China, Japan, or Mexico. We’re not losing, we’re winning.
4. The average price of a gallon of gas is $1.81, its lowest price in a decade.
5. 20 million people have gained health insurance since 2013, and health care costs are rising at the most moderate rate in decades.
6. The abortion rate has been declining for 30 years and is now lower than at any time since the early 70s.
7. Among teens, alcohol use is down, crime is down, violent behavior is down, illicit drug use is down, sexual intercourse is down, condom use is up, pregnancy is down, and cigarette smoking is down.
8. High school test scores and graduation rates are up.
9. There were only 22 US military fatalities in the Middle East in 2015, the lowest number since 9/11.
10. Net illegal immigration has been negative for seven straight years. Since 2008, the population of undocumented workers in the US has fallen from 12 million to 11 million.

Unfortunately, there’s also one big thing that’s not going so well:

1. Despite a reasonably strong economy, wages have declined since 2000 and have rebounded only slightly over the past couple of years.

It’s quite possible that this one thing is more important than all the others put together. And needless to say, anyone can put together their own list of ten things that are going badly: police shootings, ISIS, income inequality, etc. Nonetheless, when you look at the big picture, there’s an awful lot going right at the moment.

I realize that criticizing a Donald Trump policy is pointless, but Trump’s health care “plan” deserves a bit more attention. Say what you will about his immigration policies, but at least his written plan more-or-less matched his rhetoric. His health care plan doesn’t even come close. Here are its six proposals:

1. Allow insurance companies to sell policies across state lines. Whatever you think of this idea, it only makes sense if you can truly buy a policy that’s regulated by another state. Ramesh Ponnuru: “But the plan says that people should be allowed to buy insurance out of state only ‘as long as the plan purchased complies with state requirements.’ That defeats the whole purpose of the reform, and means either that Trump is coming out for the status quo or that whoever wrote his plan garbled it.” Or that Trump has no idea what he’s talking about.

2. Allow individuals to “fully deduct health insurance premium payments from their tax returns.” This may or may not be a good idea in concept, but implementing it as a deduction makes it meaningless for nearly everyone at the median wage or below. They already pay little or no income tax, so a deduction does them no good. This is why other Republicans have proposed doing this as a tax credit, which would benefit anyone. Even conservatives agree about this: “That’s not going to help,” said Joe Antos, a conservative health policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute.

3. Allow individuals to use HSAs. Individuals have been allowed to set up HSAs since 2003. The only new wrinkle in Trump’s plan is that an HSA can be used by any family member. This is trivial.

4. Price transparency. This is fine. It won’t do much to improve health care, but it’s a good idea.

5. Block grant Medicaid. This would accomplish nothing except, probably, to make health care worse. States tend to do everything they can to use Medicaid dollars for non-health purposes, and giving them total control over Medicaid would only make this worse. Also, it would eliminate the automatic increase in Medicaid spending during recessions, when it’s needed most. Overall, this proposal would almost certainly result in less Medicaid spending and less effective Medicaid spending.

6. Allow importation of prescription drugs. This is fine.

Trump has been extravagant in his promises about health care: “I would end Obamacare and replace it with something terrific, for far less money for the country and for the people.” He’s said that he would cover everyone. He’s said he would cover pre-existing conditions. He’s said he wouldn’t let people die in the streets. He’s said he would allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

His plan includes none of that. He just flatly hasn’t kept any of his promises. Instead he’s offered up something that looks like a fourth grader cribbed it from other Republican plans without really understanding what they said. Even by GOP standards—which is a very low bar—his health care plan offers virtually nothing of substance. It’s completely hollow.

The American economy added 242,000 new jobs last month, 90,000 of which were needed to keep up with population growth. This means that net job growth clocked in at a respectable 152,000 jobs—and as usual, virtually all of it was in the private sector. The headline unemployment rate held steady at 4.9 percent. The number of employed people went up by a whopping 530,000, and labor force participation was up by 0.2 percentage points. Over the last two years, the employment-population ratio has been growing steadily, and it’s now up by a full percentage point since February 2014. This is very positive news: more and more people are re-entering the labor force and finding jobs.

Unfortunately, this strong employment result did nothing for wages: hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees were flat compared to last month, and weekly earnings were down considerably, thanks to an across-the-board drop in the service sector. That’s unwelcome news after last month’s fairly robust wage growth. The economy is growing at a decent clip—and there are no signs of an imminent recession—but it’s just not sustaining much wage growth.

The Tax Policy Center has analyzed Hillary Clinton’s various tax proposals, which means we now have data for the top three Republican candidates and the top Democractic candidate: Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Clinton. Click the links for details. Or just look at the charts below for the nickel summary.

You don’t need to look very hard, do you? One of these things is not like the others. The Republicans all give middle-income taxpayers a tiny benefit as a sop to distract them from the humongous payday they give to the rich. Clinton basically leaves middle-income taxpayers alone and makes the rich pay a little more.

On the cost side, all of the supposedly fiscally conservative Republicans would blow a massive hole in the deficit. Clinton would actually make the deficit smaller.

Republicans will claim that their tax plans are designed to supercharge the economy and pay for themselves blah blah blah. This is BS, and they know it. They also claim they’ll slash spending. This is mostly BS too. On the other hand, Clinton says she’ll use the money from her tax plan to fund additional programs, which is entirely believable. This makes her plan deficit neutral. Basically, we have three fantasy plans and one realistic plan. The difference in fiscal responsibility is kind of mind-boggling, isn’t it?

Well, I got one question answered tonight: Marco Rubio has apparently decided to put all his eggs in the attack basket. He didn’t try to talk over Trump quite as much as last time, but he attacked just as hard.

Policywise, there was nothing much new tonight. Big surprise, huh? On the insult front, Trump repeated “Little Marco” and “Lyin’ Ted” several times, which is way too kindergarten even for him. What’s possibly worse is that Trump got seriously ruffled by Megyn Kelly’s questions about Trump University. For example:

KELLY: The rating from the Better Business Bureau was a D-minus, that’s the last publicly available rating in 2010, and it was the result of a number of complaints they had….

TRUMP: But it was elevated to an “A.”

KELLY: That’s never been publicly available.

TRUMP: I can give it to you. I can give it to you tomorrow.

I have a feeling we’re going to be waiting a long time for tomorrow to come, just like we’re waiting for the 25 clippings and the announcement of the foreign policy team. But we’ll see. In any case, Kelly also pointed out that an appellate judge said “the plaintiffs against you are like the Madoff victims” and then threw out Trump’s countersuit, forcing him to pay $800,000 in legal fees. She also pointed out that although Trump keeps saying the suit could be settled very quickly, it’s been going on for five years.

Will this hurt him? You’d think it might, but we’re living in bizarro world these days, so who knows?

Rubio and Cruz also went after Trump pretty hard on the off-the-record portion of his interview with the New York Times. Release the tape, Donald! Cruz went so far as to suggest that maybe Trump was lying about the wall. I doubt this is going to have much impact, but it did produce the amusing spectacle of Trump self-righteously defending the honor of the off-the-record process: “I think being off the record is a very important thing. I think it’s a very, very powerful thing….I would always honor that….I have too much respect for that process to say, just release everything.” Holy cow. This from the guy who whines endlessly about the media being dishonest and libel law needing to be changed so he can sue them more.

(This has occasioned a lot of talk about whether the Times would release the tape even if Trump asked them to. But everyone seems to be missing the point that Trump almost certainly has his own copy of the tape, or else a tape that he made himself. He doesn’t need to talk anyone into anything.)

On another front, I was amused by Trump’s excuse for initially saying he’d accept Syrian refugees because it was a humanitarian crisis. “First time the question had been put to me, it was very early on. The migration had just started. And I had heard that the number was a very, very small number….By the second day, two or three days later, I heard the number was going to be thousands and thousands of people….I changed my tune. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”

LOL. This was in September. Refugees had been in the news for months. They were washing up on the shores of Greece by the tens of thousands. Europe was expecting more than a million refugees by the end of the year. Television was plastered with images of refugees on the beaches, refugees trudging along roads, and refugees in camps. And now Trump is saying “the migration had just started.” But even with all that, he claims he didn’t realize that the US was talking about taking in “thousands” of refugees—as if that’s some kind of gigantic number for a country of 300 million. I’m not sure which is scarier: that he’s lying or he’s telling the truth.

OK, so how did everyone do? I think Trump took some hits. But I always say that, don’t I? A lot of it depends on how things play out over the next few days. Trump opened himself up to some attacks, and if that starts a bit of a media frenzy, it could hurt him. But will it hurt him enough to cost many votes over the next couple of weeks? Probably not.

Rubio and Cruz both did OK, but I didn’t get the sense that either one of them really broke out. Kasich did better than usual with his “adult in the room” schtick, but not enough to make him a player. He’s still a distant fourth.

Debate transcript here.

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11:02 – And that’s a wrap.

10:57 – Will you definitively promise to support the Republican nominee, even if it’s Trump? Rubio says yes. Cruz says yes. Kasich says yes, a little grudgingly. Trump says yes.

10:53 – This is a little hard to judge, but I’d say tonight’s debate is less of a scrum than last time but more of an insult fest.

10:51 – Kasich is taking us on a world tour again. I think he’s done this in every debate. But he ran out of time tonight and only got halfway around the world.

10:48 – Cruz wants a space-based missile defense to deal with North Korea.

10:41 – Cruz: “Breathe, Donald.” Trump: “Lyin’ Ted.” This is so uplifting. It makes me proud to be an American. Also: Trump needs to work on his insults. He’s repeating himself too much.

10:40 – Cruz: “Donald has a tenuous relationship with the truth.”

10:37 – Hmmm. Both Cruz and Trump tap danced a bit on gay marriage by saying it should be a state issue.

10:32 – Kasich: we need more common sense.

10:29 – Wallace: OK, enough about destructive left-wing politics. What would you actually do to bring back manufacturing jobs? Cruz: repeal Obamacare, pull back the EPA, and pass the Cruz tax plan. Yeah, that’ll work.

10:27 – Wallace: What would you do to bring back manufacturing jobs to Detroit? Cruz: Detroit has been decimated by 60 years of left-wing politics. The media should be telling this story.

10:22 – Rubio: The really terrible thing about Flint is the fact that Democrats politicized it.

10:16 – Cruz: If we nominate Donald, we’ll go into this fall with a candidate facing a fraud trial. Trump is getting pretty ticked off about the Trump U stuff. “Give me a break, it’s a minor bit of civil litigation.” Trump keeps trying to make it sound like there are just one or two malcontents behind the suits. They’re actually class actions. Not so minor.

10:14 – “Little Marco” again.

10:11 – Oh man, Trump is getting crushed on Trump University. His old nemesis, Megyn Kelly, says Trump U got a D- from the Better Business Bureau, not an A. And a judge compared Trump U to Bernie Madoff. Etc. Actual journalism!

10:06 – Trump is claiming that when he first said we should admit Syrian refugees, he thought there were just a tiny number of them. That was early September. LOL. Germany alone had processed 200,000 asylum applications by then and was projecting 800,000 by year’s end. Greece had accepted 150,000 refugees. And Trump thought it was just a little trickle?

10:02 – Trump: We have to stay in Afghanistan because it’s right next to Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. What?

9:57 – Who are Trump’s foreign policy advisors? Hey! Maybe Trump will finally reveal his “great team.” But no dice. Trump says he likes Richard Haass, General Jack Keane, and Colonel Jack Jacobs.

9:52 – What if the military refuses to obey Trump’s orders to torture prisoners? Trump: “They won’t refuse me, believe me.” Also: “I’m a leader…I’ve never had any problems leading people. If I say do it, they’re going to do it.”

9:49 – We shouldn’t have attacked Libya. Qadaffi was working with us.

9:47 – Cruz: Release the tape to prove you’re not a liar. Trump: “No, you’re the liar, lyin’ Ted.”

9:45 – Cruz hitting Trump for hiring foreigners at Mar-a-Lago. Also going after Trump hard on the NYT interview. Maybe he doesn’t really want to build a wall!

9:42 – Trump says he’s changed his mind on H-1B visas. He now wants to increase visas for high-skill workers.

9:37 – Trump has “too much respect for that process” to ask the New York Times to release the tapes of his off-the-record conversation. Yes, he actually said that.

9:33 – Trump now defending off-the-record conversations with the press. He would never, ever, breach that promise. It’s a matter of honor. Seriously. This is surreal. Is this the same guy who wants to change the libel laws so he can sue the press more?

9:31 – Trump is now claiming that he wrote checks to Hillary’s 2008 campaign because….something. It was business, not personal.

9:23 – Chris Wallace says Trump’s tax plan would add $10 trillion to the deficit and wants to know how Trump is going to make up for that. Trump says he’ll eliminate the Department of Education and virtually all of the EPA. Chris Wallace is ready with PowerPoints (!) and says this wouldn’t come anywhere near to closing the deficit. Trump wanders into a disquisition about negotiating better deals. He will save $300 billion in drug costs, which is more money than the federal government spends on drugs in the first place.

9:20 – I was really hoping Trump would defend Trump steaks. But he disappointed me. He did finish up with a gibe toward “little Marco,” though.

9:18 – Trump says he started off with $1 million. That is just a massive lie.

9:16 – Rubio: Trump inherited $100 million. Trump is pissed.

9:13 – Kasich is once again reminding everyone that he used to be chair of the House Budget Committee. Does he really think anyone cares?

9:06 – On national TV, Trump just defended the size and virility of his package. Seriously.

9:03 – Mr. Trump, can you respond to Mitt Romney on substance, not insults? Trump: “Mitt Romney is a loser.”

9:01 – And we’re off.

8:54 – So how do you think this is going to go down? It seems like Marco Rubio has been getting a lot of pressure to tone down the Trumpesque insult rhetoric, so perhaps we’ll see a less combative Marco tonight. But I don’t think the conventional wisdom is right. I mean, the old Marco was pretty clearly not working, right? So he has to try something, even if it’s a longshot. Besides, this is one of the things that’s kept Trump so Teflon: nobody ever sustains their attacks on him. They hit him for a few days and then give up. I say: hit him and keep hitting him. At least that gives you a chance of hitting a sore spot and provoking a meltdown of some kind. If Rubio doesn’t try something different, he might as well just give up now.

8:45 – The debate starts in just a few minutes. It’s time to butter your popcorn.

The latest HHS estimates of the uninsured rate are out, and you’ll be unsurprised that they show Obamacare continuing to work pretty well. The chart on the right shows the drop in the uninsured rate since the end of 2013, and everyone has done fairly well. The Hispanic rate of uninsurance has dropped by a quarter; the white rate by half; and the black rate by more than half.

Overall, HHS estimates that 20 million nonelderly adults have gained health insurance since 2013. Women have gained insurance at a bit higher rate than men. HHS estimates that 13.6 percent of men remain uninsured compared to 9.5 percent of women.

The chart on the bottom shows the overall uninsured rate using a variety of measures. The story is pretty much the same no matter whose numbers you use: there are way more Americans with health insurance today than there were three years ago. What’s more, premiums have stayed steady and the total program cost is under budget. If this is a disaster, we could use a few more disasters like it.