The Daily Chart
January 22, 2025 — Steven Hayward
One of my favorite moments in the confirmation hearings last week was when Treasury Secretary designate Scott Bessent walloped Oregon’s cadaverous Sen. Ron Wyden, who thinks we’re in a “clean energy” race with China (or “Chy-na,” to use Trump’s distinctive version). Transcript: SCOTT BESSENT: Senator Wyden, just to frame this for everyone in the room, China will build 100 new coal plants this year. There is not a clean energy
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January 21, 2025 — Steven Hayward
This installment is an update on two recent TDC items: what the yield curve is trying to tell us, and perspectives on California rainfall. My chart in “Carville’s Ghost” was a little hard to make out, but this new one from Apollo Academy is much more clear on how anomalous the current interest rate cycle is: Meanwhile, when it comes to rain in California, here’s another look at rain in
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January 20, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Proof that Joe Biden really liked inflation is how he hyper-inflated the pardon power, which the founders intended for rare cases of misjudgment. I’m not sure this chart includes today’s pardons, but at this point they hardly make a difference. I wish President Trump had finished his inaugural address by turning around and saying, “And Joe, you’re under arrest!” P.S. Looks like someone else had the same thought:
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January 18, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Only two more days until we put Joe Biden’s rear end in our rearview mirror. Nature is healing already (except in California): Daniel Penny is back riding New York subways; DEI and climate madness are in retreat; Greenland rather likes the idea of manifest destiny. Settle in with an extra-large coffee—this is a super-epic inauguration special TWiP. Headlines of the week: And finally. . .
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January 17, 2025 — Steven Hayward
As is obvious to anyone with a brain and basic sense perception (this excludes leftists, needless to say), charging racism is the first refuge of leftist scoundrels today. But there is a body of demagogic agitprop, mostly coming out of the leftist gain-of-function labs we call universities, that what ails the world is white supremacy, etc. And thus polls show a large number of Americans think the police shoot unarmed
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January 16, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Never mind whether 70 is the new 60. (For the record, I’ve already refuted the savants who said 60 is the new 50; they all lied.) There’s a flood of articles about how the current young generation—especially young men—aren’t growing up to responsible adulthood. The Wall Street Journal says “economists are warning that what seemed like a lag may in fact be a permanent state of arrested development. . .
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January 15, 2025 — Steven Hayward
The left is desperate to divert our attention away from the ideologically-driven incompetence of California government at all levels, but their favorite ADD squirrel—climate change—isn’t working. CNN’s opinion survey maven Harry Enten notes: Meanwhile, you can expect to hear the usual claim that climate change-related weather disaster are soaring in cost. As Roger Pielke Jr. has been pointing out for more than a decade, the numbers are never adjusted for
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January 14, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Legend has it that the incoming Clinton Administration was stymied in its big spending ambitions by warnings from the bond market that it would send interest rates soaring. (In 1993 the 10-year Treasury note in January was around 5.8%, and it went up to nearly 8 percent in 1994.) James Carville famously said at the time that if he was ever reincarnated he wanted to come back as the bond
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January 13, 2025 — Steven Hayward
From the sound of our idiot politicians you’d think climate change invented wildfire some time around 1990, when the first climate change agitations began reaching critical mass. In fact anyone with a memory knows California has been burning to the ground for centuries. And a trip to the newspaper archives turns up these: Or these: Last week I posted rainfall totals for LA from the last 20 years, but here’s
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January 10, 2025 — Steven Hayward
A lot of my libertarian friends, especially at the currently drifting but once-great Cato Institute, like to defend their clueless open-borders disposition by pointing to statistics that purport to demonstrate that illegal immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans. Even if you assume the crime statistics are complete and accurate these days (and usually it is libertarians who express doubt that our law enforcement bureaucracy reports accurately), it
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January 9, 2025 — Steven Hayward
I’ve been expecting the climatistas to rush to the barricades to declare that climate change is the key factor in the LA fires, and I have not been disappointed: Yet California just had two years in a row of double normal rainfall, but of course as John (and others) have pointed out, we let nearly all of it just run back out into the ocean: Meanwhile, fire prevention clearing, especially
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January 8, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Kudos to the Wall Street Journal today for calling out the appalling hypocrisy of Democrats on “election denial,” most especially House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. Jeffries had this to say in the House early in the week: There are no election deniers on our side of the aisle. You see, one should love America. One should love America when you win and when you lose. That’s the patriotic thing to
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January 7, 2025 — Steven Hayward
I don’t have a clear sense of who is winning the Russo-Ukraine War. Perhaps “neither” is the right answer, as appalling losses suggest the exhaustion of both sides but no sign that either will retreat, similar to World War I. There are lots of reasons to estimate that Russia has the upper hand in the long run, though Ukraine can hold off Russia for a long time as long as
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January 6, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has resigned. I guess that groveling visit to Mar a Lago a few weeks ago wasn’t enough to save him. Amazing how many foreign leaders have been brought down a peg or four by Trump’s win. Anyway, if you wonder why Trudeau had to go before he got pushed by his own party, this chart explains it, even though it is a little hard to
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January 3, 2025 — Steven Hayward
One of my low-probability but plausible surprise predictions for 2025 was that there will be a political crisis in Chicago, and perhaps the whole state of Illinois, on account of the radically deteriorating condition of the city under its radical mayor Brandon Johnson, whose public approval rating is somewhere down in the low teens. Our friends at the Illinois Policy Institute show one of the greatest sources of fiscal ruin
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January 2, 2025 — Steven Hayward
San Francisco has a new mayor taking office shortly: Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, and described as a “moderate Democrat”—a term that, if not an oxymoron, is a museum piece these days. And on the relative scale of things, what does a “moderate” Democrat look like in San Francisco? Maybe someone who doesn’t want to make drag queen story hours mandatory in pre-school? In any case,
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December 31, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, who always regarded himself as a centrist-liberal, got a lot of heat for generating the top chart below of how the aggressive-progressive left (which is how they ought to be understood) went so far left that it pushed people like him to the right. The media/academic complex is wedded to the idea that it is the Republican Party that has become the “insurgent outlier” destabilizing
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