Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, August 12, 2025
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33 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
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BlueSky.
Inflation numbers due out today at 8:30. From…the BLS.
Here’s the question, can we trust them?
Has Trump already taken his sharpie to the data?
The numbers were expected to show a slight uptick, but now who knows?
Frankly, I find it impossible to believe that Trump hasn’t interfered.
@Daryl:
Yesterday El Taco appointed a black Sharpie to the position of BLS commissioner.
Who the hell knows what has been done to the latest collected stats in the meantime. It may be the fudging system is not in place yet.
@Daryl:
Well a good amount of voters don’t pay attention to economic statistics but things they see in their every day life and whether those things are going up. Groceries, car insurance, rent etc etc. That’s one of the reasons the Dems lost the WH last year.
Trump can fudge the numbers he wants to, but voters are going to see the economy differently.
The CPI data for the report out today was collected and prepared before Trump’s appointment.
However the CPI (for today) will be more questionable because of a necessary greater reliance on guesswork (imputed modeling). Reason: staff reductions that limit the actual “shopping” that had been conducted in the past.
BLS has actually had to close several regional offices (thank you DOGE !)
Once again, Trump does something controversial based on BS and our public officials (and news media) just meekly object. And yes, I’m talking about DC.
Where are the folks who just go:
No, Trump is lying about crime
What does Trump know about beautification? Look at what he did to the White House Rose Garden. A disgrace!
If Trump doesn’t like DC, he can always move back to Florida.
If we cared about crime and murder rates, we would bring back Reconstruction, send in the NG like Eisenhower did.
Come on, people. Stop taking the high road. It never works. This screed was inspired by listening to NPR and The NYT The Daily.
Dear wife is going to the travel agent this morning to arrange a world cruise, probably with HAL, in 2027.
Next week, since neither of us having any doctor’s appointments, we’re going to make a 5-day trip to New Orleans.
Italy in September-October, a book signing tour in November with stops in Providence, Princeton, Atlanta, Chicago, Columbus OH, Berkeley, and a few other places to be determined. My yakuza book hits the book stores in October.
Antarctica cruise and South America(Chile, Argentina, Rio) Jan-Feb 2026, Japan and the Philippines in the spring, Germany in the fall for Oktoberfest, and then a world cruise. DW has the travel bug after the furthest I got away from Palm Beach County in the years 2003-2023* was St Augustine Florida.
Give my wife open calendar space- San Francisco, Hawaii, Ireland, and a safari trip to somewhere in Africa are ahead for us too in the coming years.
I love DW very much and want her to be happy. She has had to put up with me through some very tough times. Not to mention over 26,000 games of SOM baseball.
Yesterday I had a good checkup with the oncologist. I see the urologist on Thursday, and my cardiologist the Wednesday after labor day.
Somebody I know slightly had their 30,000 Rolex stolen while on a cruise recently. I wear a Tissot, bought about 25 years ago, that was on sale for $300. My backup watch died recently. I’m going to get a Timex. Goes good with my Target clothes.
I have to save money for all those trips DW has in store.
*-OTOH I did 400000 flight miles in the years 1997-2002
Podcast recommendation:
America’s Losing the AI Race to China (with Matt Pottinger)
John Avlon and long time friend Matt Pottinger reconnect to talk global security, U.S.–China relations, artificial intelligence, and the health of democracy. They reflect on their shared history, Pottinger’s career as a journalist and Marine, and his service in the Trump administration. The discussion explores China’s rising influence, the AI race between nations, how authoritarian regimes exploit democratic weaknesses, and what the U.S. must do to stay competitive while protecting its values.
@Bill Jempty: Enjoy it all. You both earned it!
@Scott:
But he hired the bestest ever interior desecrators he could find.
It may have been discussed on here before, but they are coming for Obergefell.
Assholes.
It occurs to me often when I read anything about the right wing manosphere how homoerotic it is. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but I don’t think that’s the intended vibe.
@Daryl:
CBO has new reports on the impact of the Big BS Bill.
Estimated Budgetary Effects of Public Law 119-21, to Provide for Reconciliation Pursuant to Title II of H. Con. Res. 14, Relative to CBO’s January 2025 Baseline
How the 2025 Reconciliation Act (Public Law 119-21) Will Affect the Distribution of Resources Available to Households
This is where all the data resides.
The chart best summarizing the impact on people is the last one:
Average Projected Changes to Household Resources After Transfers and Taxes Under Policy Change (2026–2034)
Clearly shows the negative impact on the bottom 20%
@Scott:
Thanks.
All this traveling combined with my bad memory for names and faces has me dreaming I will be re-enacting a scene from Get Smart between Smart and Siegfried.
Somebody on the world cruise thinks we met before. I say I don’t recall.
What about Sitka? My reply- No
What about Istanbul? My reply- No
How about Berkeley?
For Get Smart, exchange Sitka and Istanbul for Dunkirk and Tobruk.
The related impacts will snowball throughout the country. Tourism, groceries, restaurants, discretionary retail etc.. We’ve seen the arc of bad policy before. Once the momentum begins, it takes a lot to turn it around.
@Bill Jempty:
Economic numbers were improving dramatically after Covid was compounded by Trump 1.0 incompetence. Blaming the economy on Biden’s loss is a thin argument. But rather, the failure of the Dems to control the narrative especially among undecided, low engagement voters provides a more supportable explanation.
Our national political process runs more on perception rather than facts. Repubs have more money and more outlets to overwhelm narratives. And they have become expert at distilling down their messages to one word concepts. Dems are hamstrung by having to promote the complexity of facts. Which is why we spiral towards “idiocracy.”
Just as it can reasonably be argued that Biden voters committed to “Biden” values are less swayed by “imperfect” economic numbers, and stayed the course, it can also be argued the same of Trump voters. They will continue to vote Trump as our economy slides, not defecting until some serious pain is felt.
And even then, they have already been conditioned to give Trump a pass while looking for a scapegoat. At best they may sit out an election. But even that is less compelling when “hordes of transgender non-whites are invading across the border with boatloads of drugs” and a Greater America is in the making “just around the corner, any day now.” Amen.
@drj:
The theocrats are on a roll.
Now this really pisses me off!
Coffee prices keep surging — and it’s likely to get worse
Speaking of Brazil.
‘They created this impasse’: Lula, Trump at a standstill on tariffs
I also want to know where in the US the coffee groves are going to be planted so we can have American grown coffee.
@Scott:
In my experience, Hawaiian coffee on the mainland costs about $50 a pound. All Trump has to do is to raise import coffees to $60 a pound and American coffee will see reasonable by comparison.
Economics by fiat is easy.
@drj:
That is the most Karen-looking Karen who has ever Karened.
I was able to forget that person existed for a few years. Now she is back, with her Palin spectacles.
@Scott:
Hawaii. Kona is one of the finest coffees in the world. Fortunately it’s such a large, barren chain of islands, they can grow tons and tons of coffee there. I mean, it’s like five times larger than Texas, is it not? They’ll produce so much coffee, it will be too cheap to meter!
But here are two important things about tariffs.
1) El Taco is on the Epstein list.
2) If a ton of coffee from Brazil cost, say $1,000, now it will cost $1,500 with the 50% tariff. Ok, so you don’t get coffee from Brazil any more. You buy it from, say, Mexico or Colombia, who also sell at around $1,000 per ton.
Sure. But now they’re not competing with similarly priced coffee. They can raise their prices to, for example, $1,250 per ton and still undercut Brazilian coffee.
And if people get used to paying 15-25% more for coffee without massive drop in demand, such prices will stick, even if/when the insane tariff on Brazil is repealed.
Timeline cleanser:
Instructor pilot attempts to talk non-pilot to land a 737.
It’s a bit long and not very exciting. They do it two ways: first manually (without autopilot), then using all the automation. As you can see in the second part, there’s no big red button labelled “LAND PLANE NOW!”
Of interest, the pilot has a display of the plane’s instruments on his wall.
@Scott:
During WWII, allied prisoners would burn toast, scrape the burnt exterior into a pot, and make “etsatz” coffee from that.
Also, is Postum or Ovaltine still a thing? Extreme times, extreme measures.
We are all POWs now —-
Pawns Of Whats-his-name.
Rob1: Civil War history often mentions the Confederates boiling chicory as a substitute. Can we grow whatever the hell chicory is?
The local Starbucks have been the same price for a few years. I don’t expect that to last much longer.
Of course we can always substitute tea. Oh wait.
@Rob1: Have you heard about mushroom coffee? I bet you hear more about it soon.
And with sincere fondness and respect for Cafe Du Monde, ugh, chicory.
Chicory coffee is good provided its iced and you dump about half a can of sweetened condensed milk into it before drinking, a la Viet Nam.
@Kathy:
It’s well established that someone with zero experience can take off and land a plane…see “Orville Wright”. 😉
But I wonder if someone truly bereft of familiarity with a modern cockpit (and in a state of near panic) would even manage to figure out which button on the column is “transmit”.
@gVOR10:
Is the “Boston coffee party” scheduled for anytime soon?
@dazedandconfused:
On a modern aircraft, how do you even get into the locked cockpit if both pilots are incapacitated?
@Kathy:
We could have had that here if asleep is the same as incapacitated.
I was a Platinum Northwest FF from 97 to 02. Only interesting flight occurrence in all my miles was when we had to go around when trying to land at FLL. The pilot said their was a plane on the runway.
@Kathy:
There may be a way.
Can’t rule out there may be a competitive chainsaw carving artist who, unwilling to subject is prized chainsaw to the brutalities of airline baggage handlers, has partially disassembled it and carried it on.
@becca: Ah, but the beignets. And with that a touch of chicory, you know exactly where you are!
@JohnSF: There’s really not a significant coffee smuggling operation that would enable the type of opposition that resulted in the Boston Tea Party.
The effect of a whole lot of tariffs on tea earlier was to create a network of smugglers, bringing in tea from the Dutch controlled territories, and selling it for below the price of legally imported tea.
And then the East India company had a growing surplus of tea, lobbied and begged parliament for some kind of bailout or tax change, and the parliament passed an act that raised some taxes on tea, lowered others, and ultimately made the East India company tea slightly cheaper than the smuggled tea.
The tea smugglers then hyped up outrage over the increased tea taxes, neglecting the decreased tea taxes that more than made up for that, and create astroturf protests hundreds of years before artificial grass.
The modern Tea Party that opposed the Kenyan Monarchy of Barack Hussein Obama and was largely created by Fox News was far more authentic in spirit to the original tea parties than a lot of people care to consider.
America: 250 years of fuckery by wealthy interest groups that think they’re above the law manufacturing outrage!
ETA: The above summary would not be approved by Trump’s Project 1776 “Patriotic Education” nonsense.