This set of Matt Yglesias tweets caught my eye:

Yglesias is clearly right, but there’s an even more important point that needs to be emphasized. When left-liberals like Zack Beauchamp criticize their own side, they are helping their cause and hurting Trump. I suspect that many on the left believe exactly the opposite, that Baeuchamp is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The cancel culture promulgated by SJWs is one of the few things Trump has going for him this year, given that America is obviously not “great again” in 2020. SJWs believe that no one who voted for Trump should be allowed to have a job in academia, publishing, high tech, and many other industries, at least if their choose to honestly speak their minds. That’s almost half of the country! But it’s even worse than that; SJWs also believe that outspoken swing voters like me should not be allowed to have a job in any intellectual field. Only those who adhere to a radical left wing ideology should be able to work in those fields, unless they keep their mouths shut. Heck even Marxists like David Shor now get cancelled.

I hope I don’t need to explain that the cancel culture is extremely unpopular among the sort of swing voters who will determine the outcome of the election. Even many Democratic voters are opposed. So those left-liberals who try to get their own side to avoid the worst excesses of political correctness are actually helping the broader progressive cause.

I see modern conservatives as crafty villains, and modern leftists as well meaning fools. The left seems to think the best way to get white working class people to vote against Trump is to criticize Bernie Sanders for saying “all lives matter”. Seriously.

Trump’s operatives are privately gleeful watching the left commit political suicide.

A recent comment by PRC caught my eye:

Slightly offtopic, but fits into that note with Central Americans. There was a funny graph I saw awhile back where it showed that Trump was doing best (around 50+%) support with Central American(MesoAmerican Indigenous Hispanics) versus around 30% with the more “White” Hispanic groups(Venezuelans, Columbians, etc).

The most bizarre political phenomenon I have seen is that Trump does really well with non-Whites he routinely attacks(Indigenous people, Muslims), but he does bad with groups he doesn’t really overtly attack(East Asians, Jews, African Americans). I think he got 7x more Muslim support in 2016 and 2018 than McCain and Romney.

Obviously with TPS [i.e. deporting refugees], this is an extreme attack, but he tried to do it before and he was still relatively popular with those voters, what gives?

There’s a double irony here, which needs to be unpacked. Immigration restrictionists often argue that we don’t want to accept people from developing countries because they will bring along their illiberal cultural values. They may end up voting for socialists or authoritarian nationalist demagogues. One irony is that restrictionists were essentially warning that immigrants would vote for people like Trump. And the second irony is that maybe they will!

There is a very high rate of intermarriage among whites, Asians, and Hispanics. Thus I’ve always assumed that it’s only a matter of time until the white and Hispanic working classes voted in the same way. In the 1960s, that would have meant voting Democratic, in the 2040s it might mean voting Republican. Indeed that’s my prediction. And when the make up of political parties changes, their positions on the issues will also change.

I’m not sure if it’s true that Hispanics are trending toward Trump, but let’s consider why that might be the case. Further immigration could be seen as providing competition for Hispanic workers that are already in America. Yes, some Hispanics fear deportation, but I suspect that very few Hispanic voters fear deportation.

My own view is that immigration should be greatly expanded (one billion Americans!), and this view in no way depends on whether I happen agree with the political views of most potential immigrants. My view on immigration is based the the 64,000 foot high perspective, from which I have no reason to assume that my political views on the appropriate size of government are superior to Paul Krugman’s views. My political views shape my views on public policy, they do not shape my views on the appropriate ideology of immigrants.

In this blog, I probably appear overconfident in my beliefs. But I can assure you that I have enough self awareness to understand that I’m nobody special, and that there’s no objective reason to privilege my political views over anyone else’s.

As an analogy, I predict that Trump will win. But there is no objective reason to favor my prediction over the betting market’s current view that Biden will win.

The Fed has given us its inflation forecast for the first 4 years of this decade.

2020: 1.2% inflation
2021: 1.7% inflation
2022: 1.8% inflation
2023: 2.0% inflation

But what does it expect for the remainder of the 2020s?

I’m not sure, but unless it looks a lot like the following, then the AIT policy has no real meaning:

2024: 2.15% inflation
2025: 2.25% inflation
2026: 2.30% inflation
2027: 2.25% inflation
2028: 2.20% inflation
2029: 2.15% inflation
2030 and beyond: 2.0% inflation

That averages 2.0% for the entire 2020s.

Obviously my figures are not a precise description of their current intention, but I’d challenge anyone to convince me that these figures aren’t at least close. My claim is that if this isn’t pretty close to what the Fed means by average inflation targeting, then the policy is essentially meaningless.

After all, they talk about inflation being moderately above 2% for some period of time to make up for the current shortfall, such that inflation averages 2% in the long run. So what else could it mean? The most common sense interpretation is that ‘moderately’ is a few tenths of a percent above, and “some period” is a few years, not a few months, a few decades or a few centuries.

BTW, I favor a more expansionary policy during 2020-23 so that less make-up is needed in the out years. I’m just taking today’s SEP forecast (with its 130 basis point total shortfall) as the Fed’s current intention, and drawing out the long run implications of that forecast.

So why can’t the Fed do what I just did? Probably because FOMC members are not in agreement as to exactly what AIT means. Vagueness implies a lack of consensus.

The Fed is targeting inflation at above 2% in future years, in order to create an average inflation rate of 2%. The Fed is predicting inflation will be at or below 2% in future years. The Fed needs to change policy until the forecast for inflation is equal to the target for inflation.

I’ll probably add some updates later today.

Update: Here’s what reporters should have asked Powell:

“Mr. Chairman. You’ve just said that the Fed is definitely not out of ammo. What would be the downside of boosting asset purchases above the current $120 billion/month with the goal of getting to 2% inflation sooner, and having labor markets recover faster? You’ve said that current policy is appropriate, but what specific bad outcome do you fear would occur with bigger asset purchases that led the Fed to avoid adopting a more expansionary policy today?”

I often claim that president’s are only responsible for about 3% of national outcomes. Some readers wrongly infer that this means that I view presidents as being not very important. What they fail to realize that that 3% of everything is a lot.

Here’s just one of hundreds of examples of why the US would be better off if Trump were not re-elected:

A federal appeals court ruled on Monday that the Trump administration acted within its authority in terminating legal protections that have allowed hundreds of thousands of immigrants to live and work legally in the United States, sometimes for decades, after fleeing conflict or natural disasters in their home countries.

The 2-1 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit effectively strips legal immigration status from some 400,000 people, rendering them deportable if they do not voluntarily leave the country. . . .

If President Trump is not re-elected, a new administration could choose to maintain the program.

The plaintiffs are almost certain to request that the decision be reconsidered by an 11-judge panel hearing the case en banc. They could also ask the Supreme Court to take up the matter.

“It’s a really devastating day for hundreds of thousands of people who have lived and worked in the country lawfully for decades,” said Tom Jawetz, vice president for immigration policy at the Center for American Progress.

Yes, there are issues where a Trump win would be better; for instance Biden favors boosting the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%. (BTW, Republican commenters did not believe me when years ago I said the Dems favored a 28% corporate tax rate. I was exactly right.) But this issue pales in importance next to the suffering that Trump would impose on many of our most vulnerable groups.

PS. A few of you are still unwilling to accept the obvious, that the US has become a banana republic. Read this.

The US continues to flout the law, while (hypocritically) demanding that other countries adhere to international agreements:

The World Trade Organization has ruled that US tariffs imposed on Chinese goods, starting in 2018, violated global trade rules — in a rebuke of Donald Trump’s multiyear commercial confrontation with Beijing.

The decision by a panel of judges from the WTO’s dispute settlement body, which was revealed on Tuesday, found that the US had flouted its commitments to the Geneva-based trade body on several counts when it imposed levies on $360bn of Chinese imports.

The WTO panel ruled that US tariffs were discriminatory and excessive, and Washington did not justify an exemption that would have allowed them. It also rejected the US claim that it was pursuing a settlement with China outside the WTO, saying instead the negotiations between Washington and Beijing were parallel to the legal proceedings.

Here is Scott Lincicome on China’s willingness to comply with WTO rules:

Furthermore, Bacchus, Lester, and Zhu demonstrate that when China loses WTO disputes, it tends to comply with the decisions:

“Of the 27 matters litigated against China, 5 are still pending, 12 were litigated all the way through, and 10 were resolved through some kind of settlement, or not pursued after the measure was modified. These cases addressed a wide range of issues: export restrictions, subsidies, intellectual property protection, discriminatory taxes, trading rights, services, and trade remedies. In all 22 completed cases, with one exception where a complaint was not pursued, China’s response was to take some action to move toward greater market access.”

Chinese compliance is not perfect (nor is any other WTO member’s), but it is arguably better than that of the United States, which has famously shirked WTO rulings on subsidies, antidumping rules, and internet gambling.