Carol Guzy via ZUMA

From Sarah Palin:

Continued prayers for Puerto Rico, the Caribbean and all those affected by the hurricanes. https://t.co/ILemXaNDWq

— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) September 26, 2017

Well, I’m sure Puerto Ricans appreciate the sentiment. But considering that their island has been almost literally demolished, and electricity will be out for months, I’ll bet they’d appreciate a concrete expression of concern even more. Like maybe heading up a huge fundraising drive. Or maybe this from our president:

Puerto Ricans are American citizens just like the rest of us, and their home has been devastated beyond comprehension by Hurricane Maria. Tomorrow I will ask Congress to pass an emergency $10 billion bill to provide temporary housing throughout the island and to rebuild following the devastation. I expect this to have bipartisan support and to pass by the end of the week. It will take time to ramp up this effort, so in the meantime I have ordered the military to begin rescue and resupply missions as its top priority. This is what Americans expect from their government, and we won’t rest until the job is done.

Yeah, I know. Trump doesn’t have time for this because he’s too busy stirring up outrage over the protests of black athletes. What a goddam embarrassment he is.

Maybe it’s time for Democratic leadership to say something. I imagine they’ve been relatively quiet because they don’t want to turn this into a partisan affair, but they’ve waited long enough. If Republicans would rather waste their time on a doomed and horrible health bill instead of helping three million American citizens who have lost everything, it’s up to Chuck and Nancy to lead the charge in their place.

Here is S&P’s estimate of how the Graham-Cassidy health care bill would affect the economy:

580,000 lost jobs and $240 billion in lost economic activity by 2027, ensuring that the GDP growth remains stuck in low gear of around 2% at best in the next decade.

So here’s the nickel summary. Graham-Cassidy is—literally—opposed by every single constituency in the health care industry. That includes doctors, nurses, hospitals, patient advocates, and pharmaceutical companies. It is wildly unpopular, polling around 20 percent approval. The Republican base isn’t clamoring for it. It would leave more than 20 million people uninsured without saving very much money. It would remove protections for pre-existing conditions. And it would cost the country 580,000 jobs, tanking the economy for the next decade.

And yet Republicans are still trying to pass it. Can anyone explain why?

Alex Edelman via ZUMA

Here’s a headline in the Wall Street Journal today:

Steven Mnuchin, a Newcomer, Tilts at Washington’s Hardest Target: The Tax Code

I’d like to suggest a small rewrite:

Steven Mnuchin, a Newcomer, Takes a Swing at Washington’s Easiest Meatball: The Tax Code

Let’s get serious. Ronald Reagan passed three big tax bills and a bunch of smaller ones. George H.W. Bush passed a big tax bill. Bill Clinton passed a big tax bill. George W. Bush passed two big tax bills. Even Barack Obama sort of passed a tax bill.

Passing a tax bill is the easiest gimme in Washington. Passing a tax bill when Republicans control every branch of government is a hanging curve that a 10-year-old could hit out of the park. The fact that Mnuchin is having trouble with a tax bill is yet another sign of the fundamental incompetence of the Trump administration and the Republicans in Congress.

So why are people taking seriously the idea that Mnuchin is attempting a triple backflip with sprinkles on top? I think it’s because he’s persuaded everyone that Republicans are trying to pass tax reform, like the 1986 bill. That really was hard. But no one in Congress has ever been serious about tax reform. They just want to pass a huge rate cut, and they’re casting around for various ways to make the total revenue hit a little smaller. That means finding exemptions and tax credits here and there that have weak constituencies and can therefore be killed off without too much blowback. The state tax exemption, which mostly hits blue states, is a perfect example.

But this kind of aimless target seeking is in no way tax reform. It’s just an attempt to cut rates on zillionaires and big corporations without blowing up the deficit too badly. This lack of any real bearings is one reason why putting the bill together is so hard. Every loophole in the tax code has a constituency of some kind that will fight to keep it, and Republicans aren’t willing to fight back because they’ve never had any real commitment to eliminating them in the first place. This is why they fold at the first sign of resistance. In their hearts, they just want rate cuts, not a more efficient tax code. And needless to say, Donald Trump couldn’t care less either way.

Steve Mnuchin isn’t having a hard time because he’s a newcomer. It’s because nobody in the Republican Party has any real moorings anymore. They don’t believe in broadening the base. They don’t believe that tax cuts pay for themselves. They don’t believe that reducing top marginal rates supercharges the economy. They don’t believe that corporations are going to use foreign profits to boost US investments if they’re allowed to repatriate it at low rates. They don’t even believe that big deficits—aka “starving the beast”—will rein in spending. They want tax cuts because—well, because they’ve always wanted tax cuts. Wasn’t that Ronald Reagan’s big lesson to the party?

And so they’re having a tough time. They’re trying to pass a tax bill, but no one really understands why they want a tax bill in the first place. That’s hardly a recipe for success.

These are the islands of Deenish (left) and Scariff (right). The picture was taken near the Coomakista Pass, on the Ring of Kerry between Caherdaniel and Waterville. If you judge scenic points by the size of the turnout provided for cars and tour buses, Coomakista is by far the biggest attraction in these parts.

There’s a statue of Mary at Coomakista, so I vaguely assumed that “kista” meant Christ. But vague assumptions aren’t enough for this blog, so I looked it up. This turned out to be surprisingly hard, but as near as I can tell, a coom is a hollow and kista means treasure or somesuch. According to the Irish Times, “The placename Coomakista, which means ‘the coom of the cash’, stems from a legend that 18th century French privateers stashed money in the mountain recess.”

In any case, it really is a stunning view, and it changes subtly every day depending on the weather. And yes, I do have a picture of the Madonna statue! You’ll see it one of these days.

Yin Bogu/Xinhua via ZUMA

From President Trump, explaining his goal for tax reform:

We’re going to bring the individual rate to 10 percent or 12 percent, much lower than it is right now.

Boo yah! This would be quite a cut from the current top rate of 39.6 percent. Even Grover Norquist doesn’t dream of tax rates like this. That means it’s time for another round of “WTF was he talking about?” Let’s review our options:

1. It was just a slip of the tongue. But this is unlikely since Trump specifically said “10 or 12.” He really meant it.
2. He’s talking about personal income tax as a percentage of GDP, and he wants to increase it to 10 or 12 percent. But no: he said it would be “much lower” than it is right now.
3. He was talking about the log of the root mean square of the average tax paid by people in the top bracket.
4. He has no clue what he’s talking about.

Hmmm. I think I’m going with Option 4. The Post phrased this diplomatically: “It wasn’t clear exactly what he was referring to and the White House didn’t immediately clarify his intention.”

No worries, though, I’m sure the White House will explain things soon. There’s probably already some poor schmoe staying up all night looking for something—anything—that the Republican plan will plausibly reduce to 10 or 12 percent.

Here’s a hint: adjusted gross income. Currently, individual income taxes are about 14 percent of reported AGI. A tax plan that reduced this rate to “10 or 12” percent would represent a tax cut of 15-30 percent. That’s the ticket, I think.

Alternatively, the White House could just invent some new numbers of their own. Or declare that the press is playing “gotcha games.” Or insist that the president can say whatever he wants, and Beltway elites will never stop him from talking directly to the common man. Or claim ignorance until reporters get tired of asking. All of these have worked well for them in the past.

POSTSCRIPT: The Post also reports that Republicans are “looking for a way to keep their plan from being a massive windfall for the wealthiest Americans.” Hahahaha. Sure they are. DC journalists crack me up sometimes.

President Trump has issued a new travel ban that bars travel completely, not just for 90 days. So why will this one pass court muster when the old one didn’t?

Officials said his new action was the result of a deliberative, rigorous examination of security risks that was designed to avoid the chaotic rollout of his first ban. And the addition of non-Muslim countries could address the legal attacks on earlier travel restrictions as discrimination based on religion.

Now we’re talking! Trump has taken my advice and added a couple of non-majority-Muslim countries (North Korea and Venezuela) so that nobody can say this is just anti-Muslim bigotry. I especially think the addition of North Korea is a nice touch. Do we get any non-diplomatic visitors at all from North Korea?

I assume this is going to court more or less instantaneously. We’ll soon see what happens to Travel Ban 3.0.

Here’s a paragraph from the Wall Street Journal today:

Real wages for nonsupervisors, which take inflation into account, topped $22 an hour this year, the best inflation-adjusted reading since January 1973,¹ according to Labor Department data. The nonsupervisory figure covers about 70% of the workforce and excludes managers who are more likely to receive bonuses, stock options and other forms of nonwage compensation.

Translation: wage growth for ordinary workers has been so bad that it’s taken 44 years to finally catch up to the levels of 1973.

The article goes on to talk about wage growth during this recovery compared to past recoveries, but you really need to see the whole picture in one place to understand what’s going on. Here it is:

Roughly speaking, the years from 1978 to 1995 were a horror show. During that 17-year period, wages dropped by 15 percent, or 0.9 percent per year. Since then, however, wages have grown steadily. In the 22 years from 1996 to 2017, wages have increased 18 percent, or about 0.9 percent per year.

This is what makes the whole “economic anxiety” interpretation of the 2016 election so peculiar. In 1992, workers had been getting stiffed for over a decade, and winning a campaign by appealing to this hardship made sense.

But in 2016? Wages have bounced around a bit, but basically workers have been making steady gains for over two decades. In particular, between 2012 and 2016 wages rose a healthy 1.35 percent per year—one of the country’s best 4-year periods since the late 60s—and the unemployment rate dropped more than three points. It’s easy to argue—and I do!—that worker gains should have been even higher, but it’s hard to argue that ordinary workers have been in such dire straits that they were willing to vote for anyone who promised to look out for them.

At the same time, there’s little evidence that racism had any more effect on the 2016 election than it did on previous elections. That’s not for lack of trying on Trump’s part, but the white vote has been reliably Republican at about the same level for three decades.² The deplorables who voted for Trump all voted for Bush and McCain and Romney too.

So what’s left? Not much except for James Comey’s letter re-opening Hillary Clinton’s email case. Even with that, Clinton still outperformed the fundamentals. Without it, she would have won.

¹Actually, I think this ought to be January 1974, but what’s a year between friends?

²Except for 1992 and 1996, when Ross Perot split the conservative white vote.

I’ve been playing around with the time-lapse feature on my camera, which turned out to be pretty easy. Then I had to find a video editor for idiots—and learn how to use it—which turned out to be pretty hard. But I persevered! So here you go. This was taken from the backyard of our vacation home a few days ago.

I’ve been playing with the camera again. I finally figured out how to use the panorama mode, which for some reason never seemed to work at home. So here’s a w-i-i-i-i-de angle version of the view from our backyard this morning. If you squint, you can see Marian in the sun room.

More camera trickery to come later today.

Our president’s most recent late-night tweet:

Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 24, 2017

My guess is that Trump is trying to goad Kim Jong-un into doing something provocative enough to justify a US attack. In fact, this is so obvious that I have to wonder what South Korea really thinks of Trump’s little twitter war. After all, they’re the ones in danger if Kim retaliates, not us.

Alternatively, of course, Trump tweeted this because he’s a childish buffoon who has no self-control and engages in schoolyard taunts with anyone he doesn’t like. That’s certainly the default explanation for most of what he does.