Approaching the Cliff on Social Security and Medicare

 Many posts have discussed Social Security and Medicare.

Jessica Riedl at Brookings:

Social Security and Medicare finances are headed for a reckoning. Social Security has run an annual deficit since 2010, and its trust fund is projected to become insolvent by 2032.1 The Medicare Part A trust fund is projected to follow in 2033.2 Trust fund accounting may sound like a green eyeshade technicality, but it is only one symptom of the broader unsustainability of both programs.

Consider that:

• Far from paying for themselves through payroll taxes and premiums, Social Security and Medicare are running a combined $847 billion cash shortfall in 2026—comprising roughly half of the entire federal budget deficit. 
• Their combined shortfall is projected to reach $2.7 trillion a year within a decade, becoming the overwhelming driver of rising federal budget deficits.4
• Over the following three decades, the two programs are projected to run a cumulative cash shortfall of $157 trillion, with the annual gap reaching 12.4% of GDP by 2056.5
• All told, these shortfalls will account for nearly 80% of all federal budget deficits projected over the next three decades.

Clearly, something has to give—before these shortfalls drive the federal debt to a projected 240% of GDP within thirty years and push interest costs high enough to consume a majority of annual tax revenue.6 Both parties created this unsustainable path, repeatedly expanding Social Security and Medicare benefits well beyond available revenues while failing to account for longer lifespans, fewer workers per retiree, and rising health care costs.

Nor has either party offered a solution. Republican lawmakers take new taxes off the table, while President Trump opposes any benefit reductions. Democratic leaders take benefit changes off the table while pledging to limit new taxes to the wealthiest families and corporations. Neither side will admit that reining in these costs will require both reductions in scheduled benefits and new broad-based taxes.

This report aims to show that Social Security and Medicare sustainability reforms can be designed within progressive principles of protecting low-income seniors and promoting income redistribution down the income ladder. Specifically, it shows that:

A) While benefits for the poorest seniors must be protected, a growing share of today’s Social Security and Medicare spending redistributes income upward—from working families to millions of wealthier seniors whose benefits often far exceed their lifetime contributions to the system. This includes close to $5.6 trillion in benefits set to be paid over the next decade to seniors with pre-benefit incomes over $100,000 (in 2026 dollars), including $2.0 trillion to those above the $200,000 threshold.
B) The soaring cost of these benefits threatens to absorb every plausible tax increase on the wealthy, and even on the non-wealthy, leaving little or no room to fund other progressive priorities such as education, health care, climate, and childcare.
C) Because sharp tax increases face broad opposition, escalating Social Security and Medicare costs are already squeezing spending on other progressive programs—a trend likely to accelerate.

While the “just tax the rich” approach remains popular among progressives, the notion that it alone can close all or even most of a thirty-year, $157 trillion shortfall collapses under scrutiny. Mathematically, even seizing every dollar of billionaire wealth or taxing millionaires at 100% tax rates would fall short.7 Economically, marginal rates on top earners can rise only so far before the resulting economic and incentive effects begin to erode revenue. And politically, for nearly a century even unified Democratic governments have proven unable to enact substantial upper-income tax increases outside of major wars—a constraint likely to persist as Democrats increasingly represent the highest-earning regions, such as California and New York. Taxing the rich belongs in any sustainability plan, but it cannot spare middle-class taxpayers or other spending programs from bearing much of the cost.

Given these constraints, continuing to give retirement benefits for (often wealthy) seniors the first claim on federal revenue will force other priorities—poverty relief, education, health care, climate, childcare, family leave, and infrastructure—to compete for a shrinking pot of remaining tax dollars. Progressives can instead protect the poorest seniors, rein in benefits for wealthier ones, and reserve most new tax increases for those other priorities.

The Fiscal Picture Gets Worse

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt. 

 James C. Capretta at AEI

The Treasury Department will release the official tally for fiscal year 2026 later this month, but the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has provided a useful early look that is likely to be close to where the more carefully scrubbed numbers eventually land. The bottom line is that the federal government’s fiscal position continues to deteriorate, with rapid spending increases on the main entitlements and net interest on past borrowing accounting for most of the growing fiscal pressure.

The final deficit figure for 2026 is $1.993 trillion, or $218 billion above what was recorded in 2025. Revenue was up 3 percent in 2026 relative to 2025, but spending grew even faster at 6 percent.

On the spending side, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid continue to dominate the outlook, with all three growing at rates exceeding the rate of increase for federal revenue. Social Security outlays rose by 5 percent in 2026, while Medicare and Medicaid were up 8 percent. Their combined spending increase in 2026 was $217 billion, which accounts for 80 percent of the entire increase in noninterest outlays recorded for the entire federal government.

...

What should be most worrisome to policymakers is the combination of rising entitlement obligations and newly emerging pressure on net interest costs. In 2026, net interest payments were $1.143 trillion, up $115 billion compared with 2025 payments. Servicing federal debt now accounts for 15 percent of all federal spending, up from 8.5 percent in 2006.

Violent Threats Against Elected Officials

Many posts have discussed political violence..

 Nick Corasaniti at NYT:

An investigation by The New York Times examining hundreds of records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, court documents and law enforcement logs has found that, over a two-year period from 2024 to August of this year, thousands of violent threats inundated the lives of elected officials in unprecedented ways.

Some threats were vague; some were frighteningly specific. They promised torture, stabbing, rape and murder. They aimed at Republicans and Democrats alike, and at a range of officeholders from county clerks to United States senators. They targeted spouses, parents, siblings and children.

At least 44 governors, as well as their staff and families, have been subjected to violent threats over the past two years, The Times’s investigation found. That’s also true of at least 70 of the nation’s 100 senators, and at least 185 members of the House of Representatives — nearly half the body. More than half of the country’s secretaries of state, most of whom serve as their states’ chief election officers, have received threats of violence.

Do Polls Overlook Republican Voters?

 Many posts have discussed pollsters' challenges, including the plunge in response rates.

Erica Pandey, Russell Contreras andMarc Caputo at Axios:

Research suggests Republicans have become somewhat less likely than Democrats to participate in telephone surveys, and response rates overall have plummeted since the late 1990s, per Pew.

• "We definitely have more people answering surveys who voted for [former Vice President Kamala] Harris than who voted for President Trump," says Brent Buchanan, a Republican pollster and founder of Cygnal. "But if you're a good pollster, you still get the other people."
• Pollsters can compensate by giving greater weight to Trump voters or adjusting samples to better reflect the Republican electorate, which skews male, white and working class.
• Advanced statistical modeling tools can also take a poor sample and make it look like the true electorate, though results may be inaccurate for subgroups like young people or Hispanic voters, Pew's Keeter says.

But that has risks: "The adjustment assumes that the Republicans who respond to a poll are similar to the Republicans who don't respond to the poll," Rice University political science assistant professor Matthew Tyler tells Axios. Tyler said weighting GOP respondents more heavily can backfire if those willing to answer polls are also more willing to vote Democratic than the Republicans who never respond. That could inflate the apparent size of a Democratic wave.

Between the lines: Predicting who will actually vote can dramatically change the results. YouGov chief scientist Douglas Rivers found Democratic leads ranging from six to 16 points depending on how likely voters were identified in a September survey — and called the 16-point margin "almost certainly an overstatement."

The bottom line: Even with the questions about the accuracy of recent polls, most pollsters believe Democrats have the edge heading into Election Day. "I think it's telling that we're hanging our hopes on, 'The polls are wrong,'" Buchanan says. "That's not very strong."

October Surprises Have Changed

 AT WP, Dan Merica writes that the "October surprise" -- a last-minute story that changes the course of a campaign -- is not what it used to be.

“Unless you get a Cal Cunningham-level sex scandal,” Hunt said, “it is really hard to have anything cut through the clutter and the noise that is pumping into voters’ consciences this time of year.”

Instead, operatives said major stories that end campaigns are coming earlier in cycles, often ahead of primaries, so parties have time to replace candidates on the ballot.

There are three key reasons for this shift:

• Early voting: To expand access, many states are starting voting earlier. States like California, Maine and Montana began voting earlier this week, and Iowa, Kansas and North Carolina, among others, will begin next week.
• Changes in political communication: Now, campaigns can push their message earlier and without media involvement through social media and paid communication.
• Self-research: One operative working on House races this cycle said committees and campaigns “have gotten better at recognizing bad candidates early on before it is too late” and “know what to look out for before we fully embrace a candidate, before they become our nominee.”

The October Surprise is not dead. It has just changed.

House v. Senate

 In Federalist 51, Madison wrote:

In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit.

An old saying in the House:  “The other party is the opposition; the Senate is the enemy."

 Hans Nichols at Axios:

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) is saying out loud what House Republicans have been grumbling about for much of the year: They're fed up with the Senate.

Why it matters: You won't ever hear Speaker Mike Johnson or Majority Leader Steve Scalise talk about their Senate counterparts like this."There are no Democrats. There are no Republicans. They are just senators," Emmer told donors last week at a closed-door fundraiser for Rep. Mark Harris (R-N.C.). We were in attendance.

Emmer said Senate Majority Leader John Thune "is doing the job that he thinks he's supposed to do. There's a certain fraternity sorority that is the U.S. Senate."

 The intrigue: Emmer had a blunt message for senators who repeatedly say they can't pass House GOP priorities: "Don't just keep telling me 'Don't have the votes. Don't have the votes.' You suck."

Emmer said he once thought as a House member that he should stay out of the filibuster debate.

Now, he thinks his colleagues should "get rid of the darn filibuster."

Perceptions of Media Freedom

 Many posts have dealt with media problems.

Benedict Vigers at Gallup:

Even though most Americans continue to say the U.S. media have a lot of freedom, the percentage saying so has reached a new low this year. Slightly more than two in three Americans (69%) surveyed in May and June say there is a lot of media freedom in the U.S., down six percentage points from the previous low of 75% in 2025.

...

For much of the past 15 years, perceptions of media freedom in the U.S. have outpaced those in other advanced economies. Across 38 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, median perceptions of media freedom have typically hovered around 80%, slightly lower than in the United States. Last year was the first time on record that the two were tied, both at 75%, despite similarities in 2023 and 2015, when the U.S. advantage was smaller. While Gallup has not yet completed data collection in all OECD countries this year, based on available data, the OECD median will be between 70% and 76%. This means that 2026 is the first year on record in which the U.S. ranks below the bloc's median.

Virtually every president has complained about the press. Trump says that reporters who irk him "should be arrested." Can't you see that his instincts are authoritarian? I know a lot of "anti-anti-Trumpers." Can't you see it, my friends? Doesn't it matter? https://t.co/qDyxSZxwfy

— Jay Nordlinger (@jaynordlinger) October 6, 2026

Rose Research, Fall 2026

Watch this clip from The Wire.

It is the best description of research, ever.

The big stuff:

Beware hallucinations and incomplete answers. Always ask for sources and links.

Finding the literature: https://consensus.app/

Great resources at Honnold Library -- which students usually overlook! 

• Nexis Uni: news sources and law journals
• Political science journals
• Dissertation abstracts (search for "California" and "redistricting" in abstracts, and you will see a couple of Rose Institute names)

The Internet Archive—if a link is broken or altered, this site might help you find it. 

California 

• CA.gov
• California ballot measures -- archive going back to 1911
• California bills and laws
• LAO -- Legislative Analyst's Office -- analysis of CA issues
• Public Policy Institute of California -- California surveys and policy analysis
• News sites: CalMatters and Rough & Tumble
• CA elections from the Secretary of State
• California Elections Data Archive -- local elections in CA
• California State Library Digital Collections
• State archives
• California open data

General State Policy and Politics

• NCSL -- National Conference of State Legislatures -- analysis & data on state issues  Partisan composition of legislatures
• Open States -- bill information for all state legislatures
• Urban Institute State Economic Monitor
• Ballotpedia
• Tax Foundation

General Public Policy and Finance

• CRS
• CBO
• GAO
• GovInfo
• Budgets
• Biden White House Archives
• FRED: Federal Reserve Economic Data
  
• Census
• Bureau of Labor Statistics

Crime

• Bureau of Justice Statistics
• Prisoner statistics
• Crime data explorer
• Gun Violence Archive

Health

• Local data
• HealthData.gov
• Kaiser Family Foundation

National Elections, Parties, Campaign Finance

• Precinct-level national maps
• 2016
• 2020
• 2024 
• US Presidential Election Atlas -- just what the title says, great historical data (but note the unusual color scheme: red is D, blue is R)
• US Elections Project -- turnout data
• Open Secrets -- Center for Responsive Politics site for federal campaign finance and lobbying e information
• FEC -- Federal Election Commission
• FCC Public Inspection Files (ad buys on broadcast stations)

Public Opinion

• Polling Report -- an aggregation of national poll data
• Gallup -- the best-known US pollster, delivering new numbers daily
• Pew Research Center
• 2018 exit poll
• 2020 exit poll
• 2024 exit poll

Killing Off Disability Data

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute."   -- George Orwell, 1984

A number of posts have discussed presidential documents, official data, and government websites.  The Trump administration has killed off or limited access to many such resources, including the CIA World Factbook, State Department X posts, and DOJ press releases about the January 6 insurrection.

The administration is also stopping the collection of key statistics.

 Michelle Diament at Disability Scoop:

A proposed revamp of a key federal survey could lead to a drastic undercount of Americans with developmental disabilities, advocates warn.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is calling for major changes to the 2028 version of the National Health Interview Survey. The annual questionnaire asks about 27,000 adults about their experiences with illness, chronic conditions, injuries, health access and more.

The current iteration includes 49 questions related to disabilities and functioning, according to Lindsay DuBois, a research associate at the nonprofit Human Services Research Institute, which published guidance for disability organizations and other stakeholders on the proposal. Under the new plan, she said that number would drop to 15.

Importantly, advocates say the revisions would leave out a question about whether a person’s difficulties with cognition, communication, mobility or other issues originated before the age of 22 as well as questions about challenges learning or completing everyday tasks, all of which were specifically designed to improve identification of people with developmental disabilities.

“The bottom line: The proposed revisions will make it harder to identify in the data people with disabilities — especially people with intellectual and developmental disabilities,” DuBois said.

Tariffs and Capital Investment

 Many posts have dealt with tariffs and trade. 

Kyle Pomerleau, Thomas Brosy, Robert McClelland, et al. "The Impact of Tariffs on the Cost of Capital in the US, AEI, September 30, 2026

Since 2025, the second Trump administration has imposed significant levies on most imports. Although tariffs are routinely discussed as a consumption tax, 36 percent of all imports are capital assets used to produce goods and services. As a result, tariffs place a meaningful burden on new investment in the United States.

We estimate that Trump’s tariffs (before the Supreme Court’s decision) raised the cost of capital by as much as 2.7 percent. This is equivalent to raising the METR [marginal effective tax rate] on new investment by 4.2 percentage points. The burden varies significantly by asset, industry, and legal form of organization, placing the largest burden on equipment. A 4.2 percentage point increase in the METR roughly offsets the OBBBA’s tax cut on investment. The burden that tariffs place on investment is an underappreciated effect of these taxes that has important implications for tax reform, the macroeconomy, and the distribution of the tax burden.

Leaners

Many posts have discussed partisan polarization and aversive or negative partisanship

Steven Shepard at Pew:

A majority of Americans consider themselves either Republicans or Democrats. Most say they identify this way because they view their own party’s policies as good for the country and the other party’s policies as harmful.

But many Americans don’t consider themselves Republicans or Democrats. Instead, these Americans identify as independents (or with some other party) and many “lean” toward one of the two major parties. For these Americans, opposition to the other party’s policies is more of a motivating factor than support for the policies of the party they lean toward.About this research

This Pew Research Center analysis examines the reasons partisans – U.S. adults who identify as Republicans and Democrats – give for their party affiliation. It also looks at “leaners” – people who don’t identify with one of the two major parties but say they lean toward one of the parties – and the reasons they lean toward the party they choose, and the reasons they decline to identify with that party.

A Pew Research Center survey of 9,750 U.S. adults, conducted from May 26 to June 1, finds:

• 72% of Republicans say a major reason they identify with the GOP is that its policies are good for the country. A nearly identical share (73%) say a major reason is that the Democratic Party’s policies are harmful for the country.
• Two-thirds of Democrats say a major reason they identify with the Democratic Party is that its policies are good for the country. A larger share (75%) say a major reason is that the Republican Party’s policies are bad for the country.
• Majorities of Republican leaners (56%) and Democratic leaners (64%) say a major reason they lean toward their preferred party is that the other party’s policies are harmful.
• Relatively few Republican leaners (34%) and Democratic leaners (27%) say a major reason they lean toward their preferred party is the perceived good of its policies.

While most Americans identify with one of the two major political parties, a sizeable share say they are independent.

Still, most independents lean to a party – and they tend to have more in common with those partisans than with the other side’s leaners. For more on political independents, read our 2019 report.

The survey also highlights why leaners do not affiliate with their party. Roughly four-in-ten Republican leaners, and about the same share of Democratic leaners, point to frustration with the leadership of the party they lean toward – or disagreement on some issues – as reasons for rejecting the partisan label.

Dining Alone

Many posts have discussed social capital, volunteering and civic virtue.

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic:

Until 1975, half of Americans said they entertained guests at their home every month.

Then something changed. Americans stopped throwing parties. Even more fundamental, they stopped visiting one another. From 1975 to 1998, the share of Americans who gave or attended a monthly dinner party declined by half. The share of Americans saying they never entertained people at home tripled. Although cultural critics often bemoan the decline of organized religion, the dip in church attendance was downright modest compared with the collapse in hosting, according to data gathered by the DDB Needham Life Style Surveys.

In his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam wrote that if these trends continued, the ancient practice of visiting with friends “might entirely disappear from American life in less than a generation.” Check your calendars. One generation and change later, Putnam’s prediction needs an update.

So what’s the state of hosting in the 21st century? To get an apples-to-apples answer to that question, the polling group Data for Progress replicated the DDB Needham Life Style Surveys cited by Putnam. Unfortunately, the upshot is about as brutal as you’d imagine.

In the past 30 years, Americans have seen double-digit declines in practically every measure of socializing. They are less likely to play cards; attend a sporting event; go to the bar; volunteer; work on a community project.

When it comes to hosting people at home, the declines are particularly stark. Since 1995, the share of Americans who say they’ve hosted guests or attended a dinner party has declined by about 20 percent, from 88 to 67 percent—and that’s in addition to the declines that Putnam noted a quarter century ago.

Combining the two surveys, we get this astonishing fact: The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026—a 70 percent collapse in a half century.

...

 

 

Poverty and Housing Costs

A number of posts have dealt with poverty.

According to the most accurate measure, California does poorly.

Alex Horowitz, Liz Clifford, and Linlin Liang at Pew:

Housing costs are usually the largest item in a household’s budget and can determine a family’s financial stability. In the United States, a housing shortage estimated at 4 million to 7 million homes has driven rents so far above historical norms that these costs have become a significant cause of poverty. Zachary Parolin, a professor at the University of Oxford in England, examined 2023 housing costs in the U.S. and identified the states (counting Washington, D.C., among them) where the greatest share of poverty is attributable to high rent. They are Hawaii, California, D.C., New Jersey, Massachusetts, Colorado, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, and New Hampshire.

This analysis by The Pew Charitable Trusts explores Parolin’s work and examines the ways housing supply and costs affect poverty. As cities and states move to address high housing costs and increase supply through changes to zoning codes, building codes, and permitting processes, a key question is who will benefit from those changes. Parolin’s research, building on his earlier work focused on California and published by the Niskanen Center, bolsters evidence that housing costs have a direct impact on poverty and that policies to enable more housing will help reduce poverty and benefit low-income households in particular.

Key takeaways:

• In Hawaii, California, D.C., New Jersey, Massachusetts, Colorado, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, and New Hampshire, 16% to 34% of poverty is attributable to above-average housing costs.
• High housing costs are offsetting some of the anti-poverty effects of measures such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food assistance to low-income households.
• Removing regulatory barriers to housing increases supply and lowers rents.
• In the states examined in this analysis, a drop of approximately 20% in inflation-adjusted rents—as happened in Austin, Texas, and Minneapolis after those cities made reforms—could reduce poverty by 18% to 26% and child poverty by 21% to 38%.

Oppo Fail

Inaccurate opposition research can backfire very, very badly.  Senator Eric Schmitt demonstrated the idea yesterday.

A phenomenal moment in the Senate.

Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., claims he has evidence Jack Smith went to a HAWKS game in Atlanta.

Smith denies it.

Schmitt declares he has busted Jack Smith for perjury.

Smith, vexed, says he went to HAWKEYES game in Maryland.

Watch the whole thing: pic.twitter.com/J07o5Uwfxi

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) September 29, 2026

From Jack Smith's opening statement:

The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence.  Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions, as alleged in the indictments they returned.  Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power.  The evidence showed that President Trump attempted to induce state officials to ignore true vote counts; to manufacture fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost; to force his own Vice President to act in contravention of his oath and to instead advance President Trump’s personal interests; and, on January 6, 2021, to direct an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election and then exploit the rioters’ 1 violence to further delay it.  Over 140 heroic law enforcement officers were assaulted that day, a fact we should never forget.    

And, as set forth in the original and superseding indictments issued in the Southern District of Florida, President Trump stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club after he left office in January 2021 and he repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.  Highly sensitive information was held in non-secure locations, including a bathroom and a ballroom where events and gatherings took place.  Tens of thousands of people came to the social club during the time period when those classified documents were stored there.

Ballot Campaigns and Generative Engine Optimization

Artificial intelligence is an increasingly important topic in politics, policy, and law.

RACHEL BLUTH and WILL MCCARTHY at POLITICO write that AI presents a challenge and an opportunity to campaign strategists who work on ballot measure campaigns.

“Its completely revolutionized how we’re looking at messaging,” said Amanda Malo, the president of BASK Digital Media, a strategy agency working on a number of ballot measures in the state. “Whatever that thing spits out, you take as truth — even though you may have seen advertising about the measure for months.”

Research suggests chatbots can sway voters, sometimes more persuasively than conventional campaign messaging. That’s making it increasingly important for campaigns to understand where large language models are pulling information from, and how to make their arguments more likely to appear in their results.

To do so, Malo’s group developed a tool it’s calling GEO, or generative engine optimization, which models what types of messaging and narratives voters might receive. Based on those simulations, the campaign can then rewrite its website, trying to answer word for word the questions voters might ask LLMs.

Another strategist for a major advocacy group, granted anonymity to describe the organization’s tactics, said the ballot guide they produce now uses the exact title and summary of initiatives as they’ll appear on the ballot, so it gets properly scraped by AI crawlers.

...

Malo and Kunal Basu-Dutta, the founder of Modern Bay Strategies in Oakland, said adapting to AI is the next evolution of search engine optimization, or SEO. In the old days of Googling, when people clicked on links, the goal was to drive voters to a website, where strategists had full control of a message’s presentation.

...

“You have to write with the understanding that if someone takes this out of context or if someone sees it just by itself, does it still stand?” Basu-Dutta said. “Can people understand this with the 10 words they’re able to pull, as opposed to ‘can we drive them to a website so that they can fully digest it?”

That calculation is leading to what Basu-Dutta called a “flattening and simplification of language” in the messaging.

Instead of long paragraphs on a website, he goes for four short sentences. A long caption on an Instagram carousel has become several short ones under each photo. One webpage with a lot of text is getting broken up into several pages. Infographics, a favorite of political posts on Instagram, are being de-emphasized because it’s unclear what a large language model will scrape from an image.

CBO Tax Data

 As many posts have pointed out, the federal tax system is more progressive than many people believe.  Higher-income people do pay higher rates and bear a larger share of the tax burden than people with lower incomes.

Once again, CBO stats make the point:

Data tables here.

The share of federal taxes paid by households in the top quintile of the income distribution increased from 55 percent in 1979 to 70 percent in 2023. Most of that increase was due to the change in the share of federal taxes paid by the top 1 percent of the distribution, which grew by 12 percentage points—from 14 percent in 1979 to 26 percent in 2023.

Fraud and Funny Numbers

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt. Like previous efforts to reduce the deficit by cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse," DOGE was a failure.

Linda Qiu at NYT:

Since the White House formed a task force in March intended to combat fraud, top administration officials have repeatedly heralded its work, pointing to huge amounts of recovered payments and graft stopped in its tracks.

“We found $250 billion of fraud just since the president made me the fraud czar,” Vice President JD Vance, who leads the task force, said in a speech this month at the Republican midterm convention.

Yet some of the numbers Mr. Vance and his task force have promoted are overstated or lack specificity, and rely on temporary pauses in funding as well as cases and actions that long predated President Trump’s second term, according to a New York Times analysis of documents released by the administration. The task force also appears to be relying on claims of fraud that could not be verified or leaning on allegations of fraud that are being prematurely included.

In August, the White House published a so-called fraud ledger chronicling its work. It singled out three categories of fraud identified and eliminated since January 2025 — not, as Mr. Vance said, since this March, when the task force was established. As of Wednesday afternoon, the task force asserted it had found, or “uncovered,” $245.7 billion in fraud through data analysis, “stopped” $62.9 billion annually through actions like suspending providers and enacting rule changes, and “enforced” $59.1 billion through indictments, settlements and financial fines.

It is difficult to verify those figures because there is no publicly available breakdown of the total. A senior White House official said the task force chose not to itemize fraud schemes and actions to avoid compromising current law enforcement investigations.

The task force ledger’s chronology and a White House news release from August offer some details about $47 billion of the more than $300 billion the task force asserts it has identified or eliminated. But even that information falls short, leaving unclear how that amount is spread across the three categories.

Undoubtedly, the federal government loses vast amounts of money to fraud: $233 billion to $521 billion annually, equal to about 3 to 7 percent of federal spending, according to one estimate from the Government Accountability Office, an independent, nonpartisan agency that has scrutinized how the government spends taxpayer funds for more than a century.

Mr. Vance and his task force have ferreted out real cases of fraud, and their efforts to draw attention to the problem and recover taxpayer funds are laudable, experts said. But the task force’s unverifiable claims may undermine efforts at transparency and obscure the actual scale of the work it is performing.

 

Two Cheers for Socialism

 A number of posts have discussed socialism.

 Lydia Saad at Gallup:

Forty-three percent of Americans now have a positive view of socialism, marking the first time this figure has exceeded 39% in Gallup’s trend since 2010. Socialism still trails capitalism and free enterprise in public favorability but now ranks ahead of big business. Small business remains the clear leader among the five economic concepts tested, with 95% viewing it positively.

Gallup has measured Americans’ overall views of these five economic concepts periodically since 2010, with the latest update conducted Aug. 3-24.

Over the longer term, Americans have become less positive about most of the market-oriented concepts Gallup tracks. Since 2010, positive views of big business have fallen by 14 percentage points, free enterprise by nine points and capitalism by six points. Small business is the exception, with views of it unchanged. Meanwhile, positive impressions of socialism have risen by seven points.

 

Funny Numbers from the Census

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute."   -- George Orwell, 1984

A number of posts have discussed presidential documents, official data, and government websites.

Americans are increasingly skeptical of government data -- with good reason.

 Michael Strain at AEI:

Unfortunately, Trump’s attacks on the integrity of official statistics have continued. Last month, the US Census Bureau published an official brief that claims to have “readily determined with high confidence” that, of the 160 million voters in the 2020 presidential election, more than 128 million were citizens and more than 24,000 were noncitizens. “Over 32 million voter records remain to be analyzed.”

This report clearly falls short of the Census Bureau’s own standards of quality, integrity, and accountability. For example, it does not name its authors or provide relevant contact information for members of the public interested in asking questions about the report. Examining these unusual omissions, NPR reports that “the analysis was not conducted by career civil servants at the Census Bureau,” but by individuals affiliated with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute.

Then there is the fact that the brief’s subject matter is nakedly political. Illegal voting is a topic that the bureau previously would have bent over backward to avoid, lest it be accused of engaging in partisan politics. Not any longer. On the day the report appeared, Trump himself posted about it on social media, highlighting the 24,000 illegal vote figure and claiming that “The Census Bureau is going to analyze the next 32,000,000 Voters, and this number will explode. I WON THE ELECTION!”

The report’s analysis links a variety of databases together in an effort to determine if all the people who voted in the 2020 election were citizens. One is a private-sector database of voter registration and turnout records, which was used here to figure out who voted in the election. The authors then linked this database to internal government databases with the goal of determining the citizenship status of the individuals in the private-sector data on voter records.

This type of analysis is challenging for several reasons. Large private-sector databases of the type used by the brief’s authors often contain missing values for key variables (including home address, birth date, and name) that one would use to ensure that the same individual is being observed across multiple data sources. Normally, a study relying on this sort of data linking would provide extensive, detailed, and assessable information about the challenges the researchers faced and how they overcame them. That is how one convinces professional statisticians, economists, and demographers that one’s conclusions are credible. (Indeed, the bureau has reporting requirements to this effect, which the authors of this brief seem to have violated.)

Congress Struggling

 Many posts have discussed the state of Congress.

At AEI, Kevin R. Kosar and Scott Warren have a report titled "Congress Is Struggling to Govern. Are Electoral Incentives to Blame?"

Executive Summary

Congress performs poorly by most measures, and a mere 15 percent of the public approves of our national legislature’s performance. The public’s discontent is understandable. Legislators have failed to debate and craft policies to address important issues such as immigration, healthcare, and housing affordability.

This report examines whether electoral incentives are to blame for Congress’s performance.

It first traces the constitutional design of congressional elections—two-year House terms, staggered six-year Senate terms—and the framers’ theory that regular elections would produce accountable, virtuous representation. The growth of the federal government’s role and other developments have left the hopes of James Madison and other creators of the US Constitution feeling remote from today’s campaigns and elections.

The report then reviews decades of research on how modern elections actually shape legislative behavior: the near-constant campaign cycle, soaring campaign costs, the rise of primaries dominated by unrepresentative and ideological voters, shrinking numbers of competitive districts and states, and intensifying partisan competition for narrow chamber majorities.

Together, these forces push legislators toward fundraising, symbolic position taking, and party loyalty rather than substantive lawmaking and oversight. Electoral incentives do discourage good governance, and structural electoral reforms—particularly changes to primaries—have merit. Nonetheless, no single reform will fix Congress. Electoral pressures are only one of several factors shaping Congress’s performance, and there are profound normative disputes over what constitutes a well-functioning Congress.