The Daily Chart
August 6, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Here’s some news you can use in map form. If you are interested in knowing which state offers the highest density of McDonald’s to population so as to ensure maximum opportunity to source Big Macs and McRibs, here is the map for you (answer—Nevada): On the other hand, if you need guidance on the nearest pizza restaurant in Italy, you’ll need a much higher resolution map:
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August 5, 2024 — Steven Hayward
As everyone knows, we’re building out massive amounts of wind and solar power with the huge subsidies the Biden regime rammed through, but as knowledgeable people (that would exclude the White House) know, none of this works even in theory if you don’t build a significant amount of new high-voltage transmission lines from where the windmills and grid-scale solar panels are—typically rural areas far from where the electricity is needed.
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August 2, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The Wall Street Journal reports today that voters in Wisconsin are “seething” over “out of control” housing prices, and that this might affect the election outcome: Not even Midwestern manners can disguise Wisconsinites’ anger over how high housing prices have climbed. With median sale prices up 8% in the past year, according to Redfin, Wisconsin is the unhappy winner of the biggest price jump among the presidential battleground states. Prices
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August 1, 2024 — Steven Hayward
While the media spins furiously to build up Kamala Harris, worth noting that trust in the major news media among 12th grade students (in other words, first time voters this year), according to one recent survey, is below 20 percent: But the matter gets more interesting as you break out the numbers by political party (below). First, notice that institutional trust overall is lowest among Democrats (who typically want our
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July 30, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Between the effect of downtown office buildings and shopping malls emptying out during Covid and never coming back, and the jolt of higher interest rates, a lot more commercial real estate is in distress. Foreclosures have been rising, as the figure below displays, but the Wall Street Journal today thinks the bottom is near: In previous downturns, comparable surges in foreclosure activity has signaled the approach of a market bottom.
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July 29, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Once you look past the media nonsense about J.D. Vance and Trump’s exquisite trolling, you can make out the possibility of a truly fundamental debate about economic policy, and especially tax policy. Trump’s general proposal for instituting more tariffs on foreign trade makes me nervous, as I think the general case for free trade remains as strong as it ever has. Predatory nations like China are a special case, and
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July 26, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The “gender gap” between the two parties is at least 40 years old by now, though the fact that women vote more Democratic than men is always portrayed by the media as a Republican problem, but why don’t Democrats ever have a men problem? Anyway, the real gap may not be gender, but marital status. This is suddenly germane in this election cycle because of child-bearing, cat ladies and something
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July 25, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The proposition that our legal system is politically biased looks a lot more plausible when you look at the distribution of campaign contributions to the two political parties from the leading “Big Law” firms in the country. The partisan tilt is extreme.
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July 24, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Here is some of the cheeriest news I’ve heard lately. The Wall Street Journal reports that the office space market in Washington DC is collapsing. Better: it will continue to collapse if Trump wins the election. Look, I was already going to vote for the guy—you didn’t need to give me more reasons. If Trump returns to the White House, the district’s office market could be hit even harder. He
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July 23, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Prior to Biden’s withdrawal, one indicator of the election dynamics was voter enthusiasm. My guess is the chart immediately below understates Trump voter enthusiasm and intensity. I have doubts that Democrats outside of the media cheerleaders and dependent interest groups will find Kamala Harris much more compelling than Biden. The Predictit betting market shows Kamala got a small boost, but that Trump is still the heavy favorite: But maybe a
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July 22, 2024 — Steven Hayward
There are surveys showing that about a third of Democrats think that the assassination attempt on President Trump was staged, which I suppose is an improvement on the half of Democrats who still believe in the 2016 election Russia hoax. But more worrisome are the third of Democrats who wished the assassination attempt had succeeded. That is the finding social scientist Eric Kaufmann reports on Unherd, based on surveys he
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July 19, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Lots and lots of people say Trumpian populism means that Reaganism is completely dead and buried, but there’s one key part of it still very much alive in Trump’s Castroesque acceptance speech last night: tax cuts and economic growth. The other thing to watch will be trade policy. While punitive tariffs on economic predators and enemy nations like China are one thing (and let’s remember Reagan practiced a lot of
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July 18, 2024 — Steven Hayward
When the Notre Dame cathedral caught fire in Paris a few years ago, it was said to be the result of a mistake by a construction or maintenance crew. Perhaps, but there have always been rumors that maybe it wasn’t an accident. The pictogram below shows fires and vandalism in French churches. You can make out the categories by the tiny icons. Sure seems church fires are widely distributed around
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July 17, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Who knows how much governments around the world have spent to promote “renewable” or “green” energy in the quest for “net-zero” emissions, but it has to be several trillion by now. And yet the world’s share of energy from fossil fuels is little changed from 1970. Here’s the breakdown from the 2024 Statistical Review of World Energy, just out the last few weeks. And what you can readily see is
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July 16, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The New York Times, of all sources, provides a useful graphic presentation of the enormous oddity of the vote in the recent election in Britain that produced a parliamentary landslide for the Labour Party. What the election didn’t do, however, is produce a landslide vote for Labour. As has been mentioned previously, the Labour seat win is an artifact of Britain’s single-member district, first-past-the-post system. If Britain had a proportional
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July 15, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Everyone has heard by now that Trump cocked his head just as the shot was fired that caught his ear, and that otherwise he’d very likely be dead. And here’s the chart he was gesturing to and explaining, and the odd thing is that it is a complex chart that doesn’t lend itself well to presentation to a large outdoor rally audience. Normally, given Trump’s show biz instincts, you’d think
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July 12, 2024 — Steven Hayward
As John has covered, there is a lot of hysteria on the left these days about Project 2025, and above all the idea that a President Trump might actually run the executive branch. The left is so used to a bureaucracy that runs autonomously from the expressed will of the people, not to mention the constitutional power of the chief executive, that they can’t fathom the thought of a president
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