Craziness. Nothing But Craziness

Did you know that just because someone makes an allegation of wrongdoing against someone a police investigation doesn't necessarily take place? If I call the local police department and tell them that you're operating an illicit drug manufacturing factory in your family room, absent any other information, they're probably not going to investigate. They're certainly not going to arrest you based on this allegation. But what if there was "suspicious" goings-on? What if I was at the pharmacy and saw you buy a box of Sudafed? If I noticed that you had a new car? If you looked around furtively as you took your trash out to the curb and objected when I insisted that I open up your trash bags to verify that nothing illegal was going on? Nope. Still no arrest. If for some reason the cops show up and you tell them, you got a huge bonus which enabled you to afford the car and that you had a cold last week, that will be the end of it. Nothing to see here.

This is figuratively what's going on with the accusations of election fraud. Virtually every instance of "suspicious" activity reports, when it isn't an out-and-out partisan attempt to undermine confidence in the electoral system, is the result of people seeing things that they don't understand and jumping to incorrect conclusions. Every single report of suspicious activity has been answered by the appropriate election official and without exception has been explained to be either a lack of understanding of the ballot counting process, an actual error that was caught and corrected already, or something that had nothing to do with the ballot counting or election system. Every single instance of discrepancies between votes cast and the number of registered voters, or any other numerical discrepancy, has turned out to be based on inaccurate information. One such error involved using the population of several Minnesota cities to point out supposed irregularities in Michigan cities. Another pointed to a difference in number of votes reported by the state and an unofficial database which all districts had not uploaded their information into, and where not required to. In areas where it was alleged that vote counting machine algorithms where changing vote totals to favor Biden, an audit and recount of paper ballots showed no such thing. 

Over and above the perceived irregularities, accusations of the creation of large numbers of ballots for Biden in six or seven different states, in hundreds of jurisdictions using dozens of voting methods, with officials overseeing the vote from both major parties, and judges, most of whom were appointed by Trump, adjudicating the lawsuits aimed at overturning the votes of millions of people, if true, would have required a conspiracy so vast that it boggles the mind. 

So vast that it couldn't possibly have held together. 

Despite the insanity required to believe that such a nefarious, yet impossible, scenario took place, Trump is still claiming that he won, and not just that he won, but that it was a landslide, and several supporters are actually planning to attempt to suppress enough electoral votes next week to give Trump a victory that he did not earn.

It's done. 

The votes are counted, the states have certified, the judges, including the Supreme Court, have ruled, the Electoral College has cast their votes (which in a normal year would be a formality). All that is left is one more formality, the opening of the envelopes containing the electoral vote totals by the Vice President, their tabulation and the formal declaration that Biden has been elected president. 

It's done. Shut up & go home.

Now What?

Three huge negotiations were happening simultaneously in Congress. One was what is referred to as the omnibus spending bill. Congress routinely bundles spending authorizations for the myriad government departments, as well as foreign aid and grants to various non governmental agencies into a handful of giant bills. One of these was the Defense Spending Authorization Bill which passed last week but was vetoed by Trump because it did not contain a repeal of "Section 230", which immunizes social media platforms against actions taken by users of their sites and because it did contain an authorization to rename military bases that are named for Confederate generals and politicians. It remains to be seen whether Congress, which passed the bill by enough votes to override a veto, will actually override. 

The second of these (the so-called omnibus bill) was passed just a few days ago. It included a vast laundry list of spending authorizations from the routine to what could be considered "pork" pushed by special interest lobbyists. Most of these items were included in the budget that Trump submitted to Congress, including foreign aid and support for the arts. 

The third set of negotiations was the Covid Relief Bill. Among other things, this bill included a $600 one-time payment to individuals.  There was widespread criticism of this amount as too small. Democrats had initially wanted a larger amount, some factions of the Republican Party wanted no individual payment. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, Trumps liaison with Congressional leadership suggested a compromise amount of $600. The Covid Relief Bill had broad support, as did the omnibus, so they were combined into one bill and were passed with bipartisan support. Trump immediately criticised it. His criticism was that the individual payment should be $2000, not $600 and that the bill should not have included foreign aid or support for the arts, even though his budget called for those expenditures. 

Trump could have weighed in with the $2000 figure at any time during the negotiations, but chose to focus on overturning the election. He only spoke up after the negotiations were over and conflated the items in the omnibus with the relief bill to make it look like foreign governments were being prioritized over working Americans. The Democrats immediately moved to increase the individual payment to $2000, but were blocked by Republicans in the House of Representatives. At the writing of this blog post there is no word on what Trump will do: whether he will sign, veto, or ignore. Whether Congress will vote on the increase (the previous attempt was what was called Unanimous Consent, where a proposal is considered to have passed if no one objects - someone objected). A further complication is that some Republicans want to bundle the foreign aid and support for the arts that Trump attacked with the $2000 relief checks. 

Congress is always going to do things that some (or all) people don't like. Compromises that somehow displease everyone will happen. That's never going to change. What we're seeing now is just chaos for the sake of chaos. A president who is actively trying to overturn the results of an election has abdicated any responsibility for governing, yet manages to gum up the works without any real solution. His idea of negotiation continues to be the bully's way.

Election fraud?

Was there election fraud?

If by 'election fraud' you mean an organized effort to subvert the results of the election, then 'no'. 

The former head of the nation's cyber-security, Christopher Krebs says 'no'. 

Attorney General Bill Barr, who has never missed an opportunity to back up Trump, says 'no'. 

Every governor and every state election official says 'no'. 

Every local election official says 'no'. 

So why does Trump claim that the answer is "yes" and why do his supporters agree? The election fraud claims are a textbook example of circular reasoning. Trump makes an unsupported claim that there was fraud. His supporters, who believe everything he says, point to Trump's claims as evidence that there was fraud. Trump cites concerns by his supporters as evidence that there was fraud. And 'round and 'round it goes. 

The genesis of the belief that the election was stolen is Trump's fragile ego and his longstanding efforts to paint anything he does as an "historic" success. It's evident that while part of him thinks that he really is as great as he claims to be, another part of him works feverishly to undermine any hint that he isn't. It's not arguable that Trump enjoys a huge amount of support, even losing the election, he received the second greatest amount of votes ever, his rallies draw thousands of people, Republican voters uniformly reject primary candidates that he disapproves of. He has, in four short years, turned the Republican Party into the Donald Trump Party. It's easy to see how he could interpret this adulation and sycophancy as unassailable support making him a shoo-in for a second term. But there was part of him that knew he had to hedge his bets. Joe Biden was leading the pre-primary polls last year, and Trump correctly predicted that Biden would be his general election opponent. Trump attempted to hedge his bets by asking the president of Ukraine to open a corruption investigation into Biden and his son Hunter. In 2020 Trump resurrected his belief that the election infrastructure was rife with fraud. In 2016, when most predictions had him losing to Clinton, he made unsupported allegations that election fraud was why it looked like Clinton received 3 million more votes than he had. Leading up to the election he made repeated claims that the system was rigged against him. 

Fast forward to 2020.

Due to the pandemic, many states made it easier to vote early or by mail. Trump, suspecting that people who took the pandemic seriously would be more likely to want to avoid Election Day crowds and vote by mail, began to undermine confidence in voting-by-mail (except in states or districts that were safely Republican) by making wild claims of its unreliability. His supports among elected officials made attempts to make it more difficult to vote early or by mail by going to court to prevent loosened mail-in rules, by reducing the number of early voting locations and putting up roadblocks to usage of drop boxes. Much of this was standard operating procedure for voter suppression by Republicans, with the added element of Trump tweeting about potential voter fraud every damn day. Despite all of this obstruction, a record number of people voted early, including absentee. 

As the election got closer, realizing that the early voters were likely to overwhelmingly be Biden voters, and that mail-in votes in most states would be counted last, Trump began claiming that the results should be final on Election Night, despite the near-certainty that there would still be millions of votes to be counted days, or even weeks after Election Day. Even though, due to there being enough uncounted votes to make the final result impossible to call, Trump declared victory and demanding that the states stop counting votes. Entirely predictably, as the mail-in votes were counted, Biden pulled ahead in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia and retained that lead as the final votes were tabulated.. The other "swing" state, North Carolina, was won by Trump. Some states were closer than others, but Biden's lead was wide enough in all of them that a count was unlikely to change the results. Trump or his surrogates filed suits to stop counting in several of these states and in Pennsylvania to throw out virtually all mail-in votes. 

I hate to use the phrase "let that sink in", but let that sink in - without any evidence that there was a problem with the election system, Trump was attempting to prevent election officials from counting votes. He and his supporters started using the phrase "count all legal votes" without a shred of evidence that any votes were illegal. Reporting the mail-in votes was described as "massive dumps of votes" when it was nothing more nefarious than reporting mail-in vote totals. Due to Republicans in many states preventing election officials from beginning to count mail-in ballots before election day, this was 100% expected. There was nothing suspicious about this. 

A tactic that was in process even on Election Day itself was Republican observers agressivly challenging, in some jurisdictions, every ballot. It's true that Republicans went to court, claiming that their observers were not allowed to observe, or that they were being turned away or thrown out. In Philadelphia they were being kept 10 feet away (as were Democratic observers), Philadelphia election officials subsequently allowed them within 6 feet, which is what local statues called for. The allegation that Republican observers were not allowed to observe was not true anywhere, the few observers who were thrown out were thrown out for being disruptive and ones who were turned away either had no legal right to be there, or allowing them to enter would have exceeded the allowable number of observers. Nothing to see here.

Antrim County Michigan is one of the biggest cogs in the conspiracy theory machine. Early reporting in that reliably Republican county showed a landslide victory by Joe Biden; this got the attention of election officials who discovered, not a ballot tabulation issue by the vote counting machines, but a human error, reporting issue that was quickly corrected. A so-called forensic report by a partisan "expert" made multiple claims of problems with the Dominion voting machines. A hand-count audit verified the correctness of the machine count. Nothing to see here. 

Every other claim: dead people voting, vote totals changed, mail-in votes sent in after the deadline, has been, if not debunked, has been presented without a shred of evidence. Even Trump's lawyers have said, in open court, that their lawsuits are not claiming election fraud. Judge after judge has rejected Trump's claims. Even the Supreme Court, with three of his own appointees, whom he thought would hand him the election. 

In summary, there is no election fraud of any note. Trump has attempted to undermine confidence in the election, he has called for ballot counting to stop while he was ahead and to continue while he was behind, he has made farcical and ridiculous claims without any supporting evidence.

There is no election fraud.

Trump lost.

 

Political Arguments

There are many issues in politics and culture on which reasonable people can disagree. Do we send troops to country "A"? What should the requirements for immigration be? How strenuous should we make environmental regulations? A good discussion or argument with an intelligent person is something I find invigorating. Changing my position is something that I'm open to, and is something I've done many times. The phrase "nothing you can say will change my mind" usually indicates an aversion to facts and an adherence to dogma of one kind or another, and represents a closed mind. I just find that sad. 

I'm not at all shy about wading in on people's social media posts and expressing my disagreement. I make a few exceptions: family members of my parents' generation and an subset of my friends' list (who shall remain unnamed) who I have learned from experience take offense very easily yet whom I wish to maintain cordial relations with. Most of the people with whom I interact on a regular basis have similar political and culture views to mine, and if there any who don't, they choose not to express those views on social media. 

Even when it comes to Donald Trump, a president whom I find corrupt and incompetent, there are areas of disagreement where I will entertain an opposing view. For example, even though he clearly doesn't understand economics, in particular tariffs, his "get tough on China" stance is reasonable. Trump has managed to avoid getting us into any new wars, and even though he hasn't done it yet, he talks about withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan, a position that most Americans agree with. 

But what I have seen over the last few years, and in particular since the presidential election, is a complete willingness to believe anything that Trump says, despite evidence to the contrary. The claims of massive and widespread election fraud, not only isn't "a matter of opinion", but have been debunked repeatedly by election officials in every state, some of whom are Republicans, and rejected in courtroom after courtroom. Trump lawyers themselves have, when questioned in court, denied that their lawsuits are allegations of fraud, but are seeking to disallow votes on technical grounds, such as improper absentee ballot rules and the existence of drop boxes. 

Hard core Trump supporters believe, based on Trump's word, that Republicans who decline to break the law and invalidate thousands of votes, are somehow not really Republicans but RINOs - Republicans In Name Only, as if the test of a true Republican is unwavering loyalty to Trump. 

They really believe that, not only did Trump win the election, but that he won "by a landslide", by "a lot", and "easily". 

They have convinced themselves that ballots cast in the name of dead people or otherwise conjured from the ether, tipped the balance to Joe Biden, even when Republican House members and Senators in those same states and on the same ballots were elected. 

They imagine that poll workers threw ballots marked for Trump in the trash and scanned Biden ballots multiple times. 

They are certain that a far-reaching conspiracy involving the DNC, the Biden campaign, poll workers and election commissioners throughout the country, judges in (so far) close to 40 jurisdictions, Republican governors and Secretaries of State, and the Supreme Court, has subverted the will of the people to attempt to oust Trump from office. 

They ignore the fact that Trump's Election Integrity Commission was disbanded within a year after finding no organized election fraud. 

They ignore the ongoing efforts of state Republican governors and legislatures to make it more difficult to vote, targeting with almost surgical precision, demographics that tend to vote for Democrats. This includes reducing polling places and indiscriminate purging of voter rolls. 

They point to the many affidavits by Trump supporters and the Trump campaign alleging fraudulent activity and ignore the explanations from local election officials that these allegation, virtually without exception, either result from a lack of understanding of ordinary procedure or reading into innocent circumstances nefarious intent (such as the poll worker who thought it suspicious that food for only about a third of poll workers arrived at lunchtime while a white van was parked outside)

Now we have the spectacle of the State of Texas suing to invalidate all the electoral votes in four states that went for Biden. Not for fraud, mind you, but for technicalities and disagreement over procedures. 

But despite all of the evidence that there wasn't fraud on any detectable scale, despite Trump's own attorneys saying that they aren't alleging fraud, and 40 judges saying that no evidence of fraud has been presented, and even this move by Texas, because Trump, on Twitter, says that he won in a landslide, easily, by a lot and that there was fraud and an attempt to steal the election...that's what people believe.

We have a lot of idiots in this country. 

Do Record High Stock Averages = A Healthy Economy?

Is a "record" stock market a sign of a healthy economy? Maybe. Maybe not. First, let me direct you to some pervious blogs about the stock market:

https://tjpolitics.blogspot.com/search?q=stock+market

"The economy" is not just one thing, but a number of interconnected things, some of which effect our daily lives and some which have more long-term implications. We're not going to look at every aspect of the economy, but we're going to zero in on what the stock market tells us about the overall stability of the overall economy and what it doesn't. 

The first thing that it's important to know is that there is no "Stock Market", as in a unitary entity that we can point to and say "that's the stock market". There are several organizations in the United States which exist to facilitate the trading of stocks, The New York Stock Exchange is the most well known, as is the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ), there are also exchanges in other US cities, as well as in other countries. Think of these exchanges as marketplaces where stock can be bought and sold. 

The second important fact to know is that when a politician or economist refers to "the stock market", they are not referring to the totality of traded stocks, but to a narrow slice called the Dow Industrial Average. The Dow Industrial average is a weighted average on 30 stocks. Yes, just 30. And weighted by what? Price. Stocks that are higher priced are weighted more heavily than lower priced stocks, which skews the average. (See further explanation in the link above)

The third important thing to realize is the increased stock valuation of the Dow, or even of just individual stocks, is just paper profits. If you hold a stock certificate you don't actually have any money in the bank. You may have 100 shares of stock worth $1000 each, but all that means is that if someone buys that stock from you for $100,000, you have $100,000, until you sell that stock you merely have the potential for $100,000. It is entirely possible that some event will cause the stock valuation to plummet and your stock will be worth nothing. Even assuming that the value goes up, you're just moving money around. You're often not even contributing operating capital to the underlying company unless it's an initial public offering. Wealth isn't really being created, it's just being moved around. 

So, what determines the value of a given stock? A combination of a company's profitability, supply and demand, and most importantly, perception. A company's stability and profitability will be a factor if an investor is looking to make long-term investments. Supply and demand come into it, since, like anything else, if a certain stock has a lot of people clamoring to but it, then the sellers will be able to increase the price. The biggest contributor to a stock's value, however, is perception. If a company is perceived to be on the road to greater profitability, then more people will be interested in buying its stock and the laws of supply and demand will drive the price up. 

What influences an investor's perception? A technological breakthrough, a new product, or a change in leadership might lead an investor to conclude that profits will rise, as will a government administration that tends toward fewer regulations. The upward trend in stock prices during the Trump presidency was fueled in part by his antipathy toward regulations, as well as by the 2017 corporate tax decrease. But the bottom line in investment decisions is that it's all a gamble. Investors are gambling that the price they paid for stocks will continue to increase. 

So, back to our original question: Is a "record" stock market a sign of a healthy economy? In the first paragraph I tentatively answered "Maybe or maybe not". There are aspects of the economy which are reflected in the stock market. Rising stock price averages generally reflect confidence, but confidence in what? Confidence that a given company will continue to be profitable, inspiring more people to want to buy its stock, therefore causing the stock price to rise. The assumption then, is that the confidence will be rewarded and that the companies that represent the stock market will be profitable. The further assumption is that a profitable company will increase investment and employment, spreading the wealth around so to speak. But is that the correct assumption to make? 

Not necessarily.

The goal of anyone running a large company isn't to create jobs, although that may be a side effect. Any company that can increase profits without increasing, or even maintaining, employment levels will do so. Anyone who has been involved in planning at any level in a capitalistic endeavor knows that the first area that is cut if profits are threatened is labor. And it doesn't take a threat to the profit margins for jobs to be eliminated, even a desire to maximize the amount of profit can result in a reduction in the workforce if other methods don't easily present themselves. Of course, in some industries, expansion will require additional workers. If you're going to open another factory, you'll need additional factory workers, but if you're just going to increase output, it might be done just by increasing productivity - pushing people harder or by automation. 

Theoretical considerations aside, what does the stock market's (i.e. the Dow Jones Industrial Average) record high valuation tell us about the economy in general? Very little. The official unemployment rate is still close to 7%, around twice the level it was at the beginning of the pandemic (although around half its nadir of 15% a few months ago); we are still looking at a huge net loss in jobs compared to the first of the year; many small businesses have closed and whole segments of the entertainment and service industries have shut down; evictions are at an all-time high. 

It's obvious that these stratospheric stock prices are not translating into better conditions for people who aren't in the top 1% of the country. They're not even necessarily translating into increased profits for the companies issuing the stock. What they represent is a gamble, not on the prospects of these companies increasing employment and investment, benefitting broadly, or even their long-term profitability, but that stock prices will increase enough to guarantee a profit to the gambler when the stocks are sold. 

"The Stock Market" is an illusion of economic health, not the reality.