I’m having a little trouble finding something both new and interesting to write about today, but luckily for us all the Fed released its latest Flow of Funds report this morning. I may have some additional interesting tidbits to write about later, but for now here’s the basic distribution of national income:

Apologies for the chart being so busy, but the results are pretty clear. As you can see, corporate profits have recovered completely from their pandemic low and proprieters’ income has not only recovered but skyrocketed. Both are at or above their trendline growth from before the pandemic.

And then there’s employee compensation. That’s you and me and all the wait staff and retail employees and so forth who are still furloughed while we wait for the economy to open back up. Employee compensation has not recovered. It’s about $40 billion below its pre-pandemic trendline growth. But hey, what’s $40 billion between friends?

Answer: Quite a bit, actually! This is mostly income lost by those who have been furloughed, which amounts to something like 10 million workers. That comes to an average of about $4,000 each, which is why a one-off $600 stimulus payment is laughable to these folks. Conversely, an extra $300 a week for three months would make them nearly whole.

But as long as corporate profits are doing OK, Republicans just can’t be bothered with this kind of petty detail. I guess that’s why they’re the party of the regular guy, or so I keep hearing from them.

The United States passed two milestones on Wednesday: we recorded more than 3,000 deaths and our mortality rate rose firmly above the peak of our first wave. Those vaccines can’t come fast enough.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through December 9. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

This is a display of illuminated lotus plants from the Moonlight Forest show at the LA County Arboretum a couple of years ago—in the Before Times when such things were allowed. Luckily, they can live forever in photographs.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through December 8. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Is this signature the only thing Donald Trump cares about?Imago via ZUMA

This is so, so dumb:

The Trump administration on Tuesday proposed an economic relief package that would offer far skimpier federal unemployment benefits than what has been proposed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, adding an element of uncertainty into the fragile stimulus negotiations, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Instead, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has proposed that lawmakers approve another stimulus check worth $600 per person and $600 per child, the people familiar with the plan said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share details of private deliberations.

….Under the bipartisan framework released last week by a group of moderate lawmakers, Congress would approve…supplementary unemployment benefits at $300 per week while extending various unemployment programs that are set to expire at the end of the year. The framework did not include another round of stimulus payments.

I truly don’t get this. I literally can’t think of any coherent reason to prefer a flat $600 benefit for everyone—most of whom don’t need it—instead of a targeted benefit for those who do need it. The flat payment would be worse stimulus; it wouldn’t be as helpful to those in need; and it wouldn’t cost any less. But Donald Trump is so blinkered that he can’t imagine anything being better than just sending everyone a check with his name on it. Or something.

Can anyone explain this to me? It seems like such a no-brainer. Has someone in the GOP brain trust decided that unemployment benefits go more toward Democratic-leaning workers than Republican-leaning workers? Are they still stuck on the idea that unemployment payments will prompt workers to stay at home lazing on the couch instead of getting back to workplaces that aren’t even open? Are they afraid that UI benefits go mostly to the poor, and they hate the idea of helping the poor? Is it something else? This is just inexplicable.

Be afraid, be very very afraid that this woman is in charge of the federal budgeting process.Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA

Here is Jim Geraghty writing in National Review about Joe Biden’s Cabinet choices. He says they were going fine for a while, but then Biden went nuts:

First, Biden nominated Neera Tanden to head the Office of Management and Budget, a combative figure who has alienated policymakers and activists on the left, right, and center. Then Biden nominated California state attorney general Xavier Becerra to be the next secretary of Health and Human Services. As John McCormick lays out, in Becerra, Biden has selected a hardline partisan with no health-care experience to run HHS during a pandemic.

….Personnel is policy. Biden may envision a calmer, less contentious, less partisan start to his presidency, but Tanden and Becerra in particular are not the figures that are likely to make that happen. Ross Douthat warns that a “Becerra-fied Democratic presidency, in which the bureaucracy is using ‘public health’ as an excuse to battle gun owners one week and Catholic hospitals the next, will be successful only in keeping the conservative coalition united, loyal and activated.”

First of all—and yes, I’m serious about this—it’s actually nice to see ordinary old griping like this. After four years of Donald Trump’s lunacy, old-school partisan attacks like this are sort of refreshing.

On the substance, however, can I say that it’s a little rich for conservatives to be complaining that Biden has the gall to nominate a few partisan fighters to his Cabinet? I mean, after four years of Seema Verma being in charge of CMS; two years of Mike Pompeo being in charge of the State Department; Bill Barr (!) as Attorney General; Eugene Scalia at Labor; Scott Pruitt at EPA; Mick Mulvaney at OMB; and too many others to count—after all that, plus random firings of anyone deemed insufficiently loyal to the cause, we’re now complaining about Neera Tanden? Please.

Still, Geraghty inadvertently brings up a disturbing point. Back in the days of dinosaurs, it was standard practice for the Senate to allow a president to have a Cabinet of his choice. I mean, that makes sense, even if the president is from the opposite party. It was sort of traditional for one candidate to blow up over some minor scandal or another, but once that scalp was taken, everything else went pretty smoothly.

Is that tradition gone? We’ll see. But there’s more to it. Cabinet officials generally got confirmed because they’re in the media spotlight and no one really wanted to look like partisan hacks opposing them just for the sake of opposition. But there are thousands of other appointments at lower levels who are critical to carrying out a president’s agenda. Those are very definitely not in the spotlight, and if a Republican Senate decides to stonewall these appointments the consequences could be pretty dramatic. The old appointees will mostly leave, but if new ones can’t be confirmed then we’ll be left with a huge number of important policy positions being run by civil servants in acting positions. This is something to watch very closely after the drama of the Cabinet selection is over and everyone settles down to routine business.

Today brings some good health news. My M-protein level is the same as last month and still well below the level at which it indicates trouble. This means that my multiple myeloma is remaining pretty well controlled:

On the somewhat less good news front, the Pomalyst appears to be doing a number on my white cell count, and I’m continuing to suffer from the periodic stomach upset that I mentioned last month. Immodium helps, but it’s still pretty annoying and tiring.

I have an office visit (or should I say “office” visit these days?) with my oncologist at the end of the month, and I’ll ask about all this. It’s possible that I’m getting close to the end of the road with Pomalyst and will need to shortly switch to yet another med. We’ll see.

This is an ewok absolutely adorable red panda at the San Diego Zoo. Don’t you wish you could take one home?

Margaret Keenan becomes the first person to receive the Pfizer vaccine after its approval in the UK.Jacob King/PA Wire via ZUMA

This chart has been making the rounds this morning. It’s from the FDA briefing paper on Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine:

The vaccine becomes effective about ten days after injection and remains effective four months later. Patients who received the vaccine reported minor adverse reactions that typically lasted a few days, but “The frequency of serious adverse events was low (<0.5%), without meaningful imbalances between study arms.”

All this said, I once again want to show the timeline for this vaccine development:

• January 10: China releases virus genome.
• Mid-February: Vaccine developed by partner BioNTech.
• December 8: Vaccine available for mass distribution.

We can argue all day long about whether the FDA was too slow to approve one thing or another, but don’t let this blind you to what’s happened here, which is beyond spectacular: we went from raw genome to approved vaccine in 11 months for a brand new virus. And several other companies have done the same. This is nothing less than a watershed in vaccine development, and there’s every reason to think that future development might reduce even this astonishing timeline.

I believe the 2020s will be the decade of CRISPR. The 2030s will probably be the decade of human-level AI. The 2040s will be the decade of climate change.¹ What we need now is a political system that can handle all this without collapsing from within.

¹To be clear: I believe that we will do far too little to address climate change over the next couple of decades. The 2040s will be the decade when it becomes obvious to even the most devoted skeptic that we’re in big trouble and have to do something. That something will probably be geoengineering, with cheap aerosol deployment in the stratosphere the leading candidate.

Why do so many rank-and-file Republicans believe that the election was stolen from Donald Trump? Ross Douthat took a crack at answering that question over the weekend, but I think he put too much effort into it with his taxonomy of believers. The answer just isn’t that hard.

Consider the average person. Black, white, male, female, Democrat, Republican: it doesn’t matter. The vast majority don’t really follow politics, and even the ones who do aren’t in the business of diving into primary sources. They form their opinions the way most of us do: by listening to people they trust. On our side that’s people like Paul Krugman, Rachel Maddow, Barack Obama, and occasionally maybe even me. On the conservative side it’s Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. On both sides, we might accept that our trusted sources sometimes exaggerate or cherry pick a bit, but we assume they don’t routinely lie.

So what have conservatives heard over the past month since the election? I hardly have to tell you, do I? Trump has kept up a tsunami of tweets insisting that Democrats cheated on a massive scale. He has launched lawsuits by the dozens to show that he’s serious. Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh (not to even mention lunatics like Mark Levin and Lou Dobbs) have supported the wildest conspiracy theories daily. The Journal editorial page has been more middlebrow about the whole thing, as it always is, but even they have insisted that we should let the challenges run their course because, hey, who knows? And among Republican political leaders, the response to Trump’s Twitter rages has ranged all the way from silence to full-blown conspiracy mongering. Only a tiny handful have finally admitted that Biden won.

So if you’re someone who’s already suspicious of Democrats in general—and doubly suspicious of Democratic election fraud, because that’s been a staple of Republican discourse for years—what reason would you have not to believe that Trump was the victim of massive fraud? If the shoe were on the other foot and Biden or Obama was leading a similar charge, you and I would probably believe too.

This is the Occam’s Razor answer, and I don’t think it needs to be any more complicated. The conservative media ecosystem has rallied around Trump, and conservatives trust their media as much as liberals trust theirs. The result is what we see in polls like the one above: 70 percent believe the election wasn’t fair. Those opinions probably range from folks who think there was cheating here and there, all the way to those who literally think millions of votes were stolen by crooked Deep State officials and their Dominion election machines. What further explanation is necessary?

POSTSCRIPT: This is solely about rank-and-file Republicans. None of it addresses the question of why all their opinion leaders have fallen into lockstep about election fraud, and the motivation is certainly different there. Some are true believers. Think Lou Dobbs. Some are delusional. Think Donald Trump. Some are just kowtowing to their audience. Think Sean Hannity. And practically all of them are in it for the money.