The Daily Chart
December 6, 2024 — Steven Hayward
In the article I wrote for the American Mind a few weeks ago about what Trump ought to do on Day One in office was this: With excessive government spending having reached a crisis point, President Trump ought to mount a frontal challenge to our profligate Congress by impounding some spending in defiance of the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act. (For starters, I nominate impounding State Department grants
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December 5, 2024 — Steven Hayward
As we have covered here in several different ways, the Trump victory is impressive in its uni-directionality. It turns out that Harris is the first presidential candidate since Herbert Hoover in 1932 who didn’t shift a single county in the country in her party’s direction from the previous election. A unidirectional loss like that may not be a statistical landslide, but as argued previously here, it is at least an
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December 4, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Everyone knows that Argentina’s president Javier Milei likes to brandish a chain saw as a symbol of his zeal to cut government, and so far he has been good to his word, cutting spending such that Argentina is running a surplus for the first time in decades, and cutting monthly inflation from around 25% to about 2.% percent.
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December 3, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Britain’s left-leaning newspaper The Independent says: Keir Starmer suffers ‘unprecedented’ collapse in popularity for new PM Sir Keir Starmer’s approval rating has collapsed more significantly after winning an election than any other prime minister in modern history, a new poll has shown. According to one recent poll, Labour’s generic lead over the Tory Party is down to just 1 point, barely six months after routing the Tories in the latest
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December 2, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Let’s have a little fun with the format today. In a world awash in data, it figures someone would try to quantify how many European prime ministers have ever been eaten by their constituents. Sure enough, the citizens of the Netherlands ate their prime minister Johann De Witt in the 17th century, blaming him for a plague. (Anthony Fauci and other Branch Covidians ought to watch out!) I suspect political
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November 29, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The noted public intellectual Sharon Stone (you thought I added an extra letter in the adjective perhaps?) has attracted heat for saying that Trump won because Americans “don’t travel and are uneducated.” (And the ever-reliable Jennifer Rubin has said that America suffers from an “epidemic of ignorance.” “[Trump] is the president of the ignorant. Democrats have to work on making them less ignorant.”) Before you write this off as just
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November 28, 2024 — Steven Hayward
I think it was back in the 1970s or 1980s that the term “Eurosclerosis” was coined as the term for lagging European economic performance. Thatcher and other right-leaning leaders helped turn around many countries, but European growth is once again anemic, as can be shown by how European public companies have not kept up with American companies: I wonder if this might be among the reasons:
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November 27, 2024 — Steven Hayward
As everyone knows, California is losing population. It’s quite a progressive achievement: how do you make a place of such beauty and benign climate so unfavorable that for the first time since statehood in 1850, California is no longer attractive to people to stay or come in the first place (except, of course, for foreign “migrants”). A few years back I saw some data from the Public Policy Institute of
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November 26, 2024 — Steven Hayward
What’s left of the Democratic Party? Hardly anything, if you mean “left” ideologically rather than just the remains of the party after an election loss of this character. The media and demented political scientists like my former colleague Norm Ornstein have been arguing for years that the GOP is the radical party in American politics, but the data say otherwise: What’s the chief attraction of the Democratic Party today? The
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November 25, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Thesis: The green energy revolution is failing everywhere, and I think it is possible the second Trump Administration will kill it off once and for all, everywhere. But I think the Daily Chart is an ideal place to track this with data, so let’s start a series! Let’s start with Great Britain, where one day last week (not sure which date exactly) you can see how natural gas is the
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November 22, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this week that cheating at college has become rampant: Some institutions, including Middlebury College, in Vermont, and Stanford University, are reconsidering elements of their honor codes because they’re simply not working. At Middlebury, the percentage of students who admitted on an annual survey to violating the honor code rose from 35 percent in 2019 to 65 percent in 2024. The most common self-reported violations
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November 21, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The New York Times is out with its deep dive into the election returns in an effort to figure out why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump, and their shocking conclusion is that Trump won because he got more votes than Harris! No, really, it is almost that stupid. Here’s the headline: The Times is puzzled that Harris received 7 million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020. Maybe it
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November 20, 2024 — Steven Hayward
After the 2012 election I proposed the hypothesis that the oil and gas boom that accelerated during Obama’s first term (thank you, fracking) was a major factor in his successful re-election. On the surface it is significant how much of the slow employment growth that we had during the post 2008 crisis was lopsided in fossil energy and related occupations. It almost got Harris elected, too: And as anyone who
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November 19, 2024 — Steven Hayward
While the U.S. economy continues to chug along, and will perhaps gain considerable speed once Trump II takes the visible foot of government off the invisible hand of the market, Europe’s economy continues to decline in relative and absolute terms. One reason for this is the EU’s “Net-Zero” monomania. How bad is it? This bad: And I’ve posted this one recently, too, but worth repeating:
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November 18, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Even as our windmill-tilting climatistas try to ban our gas stoves (hopefully slowed up by voters in liberal jurisdictions like Washington state and even Berkeley voting against this madness), China and other nations in Asia are rapidly expanding their use of natural gas. (But coal is still growing too.) So lifting Joe Biden’s stupid ban on further U.S. natural gas exports cannot come soon enough. Anyway, a few charticles from
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November 15, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Canada’s next national election is still almost a year away (though it could be called sooner), but it clearly can’t come soon enough. Though the interregnum may provide some comic relief in the form of President Trump smacking down the eminently smackable Justin Trudeau at the next G-7 meeting.
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November 14, 2024 — Steven Hayward
I’ll never get tired of seeing more election data demonstrating what a disaster this election was for Democrats. Pollster Patrick Ruffini points out that the intersectional identity pyramid voted in exactly the inverse of what Critical Race Theory demands. The only cohort where Dems did better than 2020 was over-educated whites: And Puerto Rican voters didn’t get the memo about the Madison Square Garden Nazi rally (or if they did
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