DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

Thomas Hobbes blamed the coming of the English Civil War (at least in part) on rhetorically skilled parliamentarians “with no arguments at all”. Gruen sees him as both right and wrong: right to seek an answer in fiduciary cognitive societal-scale institutions like science, but overwhelmingly wrong in his fever dream that, starting from geometry, we could maintain certainty in a logical chain of reasoning that would carry us to a science of justice. The real virtues of science are that it “reorders prestige to follow evidence, rather than the reverse” while making reasoning inspectable. Good institutions inject contestability, and grant standing to whoever can competently join the argument.

Thus our worries about the destructive rhetoric of spin and bullshit destroying public reason are not new, 350 years old. Or perhaps 2075 years old: recall how Quintilian reported that Cicero gloried in his having spread darkness over the jurors in Pro Cluentio. Or perhaps 2450 years old: do recall that Hobbes picked up on Thoukydides’s lamenting that during the Peloponnesian War

words had to change their ordinary meaning….. “Reckless audacity” came to be considered “the courage of a loyal ally”; “prudent hesitation”, “specious cowardice”; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness…

<https://nicholasgruen.substack.com/p/hobbes-on-spin-and-bullshit> <https://nicholasgruen.substack.com>

What Hobbes understood about spin and bullshit

Much of what is now said about public discourse — that manipulation and spin prevail over truth and candour, that pleasing abstractions displace description, and that profile confers standing more readily than expertise or disinterest — was said in much the same terms by the great 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes about rhetoric.[1]

Hobbes’s account of what public speech is for could stand for our own time (even if his ultimate remedy was extreme — showing all the motivated impatience of the intellectual). The office of a counsellor is to make the consequences of a course of action manifest, so the person counselled may be “truly and evidently informed”; speech that works by stirring the passions is “repugnant to the Office of a Counsellour.”[2] Against that standard he listed rhetoric among the causes of a commonwealth’s dissolution,[3] and in Behemoth proposed that the Civil War was largely talked into being — by dissenting Presbyterian ministers, and by parliamentarians with great rhetorical skill and no arguments at all.[4]

For Hobbes, this was existential. Over a decade before the English Civil War, he’d translated Thucydides, dwelling on the way in which the tumult of civil war tore civilisation asunder, “the received value of names” being changed at will. Thucydides depicted a society losing its hold on its own vocabulary, and so on reality itself. A prime instrument of the transformation was described in rhetoric as paradiastole — the redescription of a vice under the name of a neighbouring virtue. Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1577) gave the example of calling murder “a manly deede”, and Shakespeare illustrates it when Lady Macbeth goads her husband into murdering Duncan in his sleep: “When you durst do it, then you were a man”. We’re inured to this today from our political class. Kidnapping becomes ‘extraordinary rendition’, torture ‘enhanced interrogation’.

Seven such parallels between Hobbes’s concerns then and ours today are set out in the appendix.

However, two things have changed in the centuries since Hobbes wrote, not for the better. First, classical rhetoric was typically adversarial and, in its forensic form, retrospective: opposing advocates contested the appraisal of deeds already done.[5] Its practitioners therefore spoke in the expectation of contradiction: an advocate’s case had to survive another advocate’s attempt to break it. Modern advertising, public relations and corporate values statements typically carry no equivalent constraints. Though they may be deployed to pre-empt criticism, their puffery faces no equivalent adversary; their pleasing abstractions gesture to the future and float free of the inevitable frictions and dilemmas of reality: “Excellence in everything we do”.

The second difference concerns who is listening. Castiglione’s courtier was trained to inform his prince candidly on any matter he needed to understand.[6] The scheme assumed a prince who wanted to know, because he governed and stood to suffer for his own mistakes. He might still prefer flattery, but an honest counsellor would set his interest against his vanity.

By contrast, modern institutional speech is often different in both respects. No corporation hires anyone to argue that it doesn’t actually operate according to the pleasing values hanging in the foyer — that it lacks integrity, responsiveness or respectfulness in specific respects. The Catholic Church did something similar in having candidates for sainthood run the gauntlet of the devil’s advocate.[7] Hence the quiet coerciveness of so much institutional language: it is less an account of what is or was done than the peremptory assertion of a free-floating benignity which only the churlish would dispute. And its audience is diffuse — the honeyed, vapid words radiate outward to ‘stakeholders’ and forward in endless time, but never constrain what senior managers actually do.

Hobbes looked to science for a way out of all this.[8] I think he was right. And wrong.

What impressed him was geometry’s promise of certainty. For Hobbes, geometry starts from principles evident to anyone and arrives at equally secure conclusions. He set out to create a science of just and unjust, demonstrated, as he put it, from principles evident to the meanest capacity. His younger contemporary Descartes pursued a similar ambition: to take nothing for granted and build from indubitable foundations.

Even in natural science, if there are any indubitable foundations, they’re too thin, too emptily formal to take you very far. Hobbes’s task was harder still: not just to understand human motivation but to deduce the ideal institutions under which people should live.

But Hobbes was right to look to science for an answer to a problem that beleaguered his own time as it beleaguers ours: rhetorical tricks unmooring public institutions from reality and its inevitable dilemmas. Science reorders prestige to follow evidence, rather than the reverse. And it makes reasoning inspectable, so claims can be questioned on their merits by someone with no standing whatever.

That does not mean that public policy should be value-free in the way often associated with science, still less that scientists should rule, though scientific consensus should presumptively enjoy high standing. Successful scientific institutions do not abolish rhetoric or hierarchy; they introduce contestability at every step of scientific reasoning and accord standing to whoever can join the contest competently. Yet so much of our own governing code — values statements, for instance — comes down from on high, and it’s not really for challenge.

By contrast, Toyota’s commitment to getting it ‘right first time’ at each step of the production line is enforced from the bottom. If there’s an error on the line that the process worker can’t solve, they pull the andon cord for more assistance, and if the problem can’t be solved as the production line moves, it is stopped. In other words, teams are given a live veto power to protect the agreed-upon standard.

My proposed Evaluator General seeks to build something more elaborate in government on the same principles so that evidence and front-line learning have standing against managerial imperatives. Each turns a professed value into an institutional power.

Such arrangements do not require agreement about ends. They need to be built into institutions rather than left to individuals whose efforts will mostly go unrewarded or be punished.

We have barely begun to take that seriously in public life.

The complaint today: Edward Bernays opens Propaganda (1928) by describing his own trade as the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses,” carried on by an unseen mechanism he was content to call an invisible government. Drawing on his uncle Sigmund Freud, he argued that the appeal should be made not to the rational part of the mind but to the unconscious — a man may buy a car not to travel in but because it stands for something he would be embarrassed to name.

Hobbes’s complaint: Hobbes defines the “gift of eloquence” as the ability to make good and evil, expedient and inexpedient, honourable and dishonourable “appear to be greater or less than they are in fact,” and to make injustice appear as justice, in whatever way suits the speaker’s purpose.[9] He is echoing the rhetoricians’ own vocabulary of amplification and extenuation back at them: their claim was that the powerful speaker knows how to magnify what favours his cause and diminish what tells against it, quelling or inflaming an audience at will.[10]

The complaint today: Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit isolates a pathology distinct from lying. The liar is still tethered to the truth — in order to conceal it. The bullshitter, in Frankfurt’s phrase, is indifferent to how things really are.

Hobbes’s complaint: The rhetoricians had promised that their art would unite oratio atque ratio; that is, speech with reason. Yet Hobbes argues that what we get is oratio praeter rationem — speech running alongside reason without touching it.[11]

The complaint today: George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (1946) argues that political speech consists largely of euphemism and question-begging because it is mostly the defence of the indefensible: villages burnt and inhabitants driven out become pacification. Political language, he concludes, is designed to make lies sound truthful, murder respectable, and give “an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Today kidnapping is ‘extraordinary rendition’, torture ‘enhanced interrogation’, and to lie is to ‘misspeak’.

Hobbes’s complaint: The figure had a name: paradiastole, the redescription of a vice under the name of a neighbouring virtue. Every virtue lies between two vices, so every virtue has a bordering vice it can be slid into. By the end of the sixteenth century, on Skinner’s account, ‘paradiastole’ was widely denounced.[12] In Hobbes’s time, Shakespeare had Lady Macbeth redescribe murder as manliness; Henry Peacham’s rhetoric textbook had already listed murder as “a manly deede”.

The complaint today: “Lifting productivity is crucial today with governments keen to reduce budget deficits while satisfying voters’ rising expectations.” Something that should be adopted for its own sake is presented as answering some special strategic priority. I dubbed this ‘strategisation’ and it’s everywhere. Strategisation supplies the appearance of a reason for action but not its substance.

Hobbes’s complaint: Rhetorical inventio proceeded by running a matter through the loci communes — pre-set topical headings, described by the theorists themselves as seats or storehouses from which stock maxims could be hunted out and applied. As with strategisation, the link is rhetorical, not substantive. Hobbes argues that accommodating one’s arguments to received opinion cannot in principle yield knowledge.[13] Hobbes’s concerns also surface much earlier, when he served as secretary to Francis Bacon, whose 1620 Novum Organum carries the same analysis in its charge that leaders of science order existing customs and what is already known rather than devising methods of invention.[14]

The complaint today: Jay Rosen calls the working ideology of the political press “savviness”: a claim to authority based on practical, unsentimental realism — knowing how politics “really works” while treating substantive positions as ideological or naïve. The savvy journalist does not claim to have the better analysis but to stand closer to the ‘real action’. Reading a David Speers column at the height of the lockdown debate, I documented the phenomenon line by line. The advice of a Chief Medical Officer whose judgement had already proven faulty was relayed uncritically, though New Zealand’s better-performing officials advised the opposite course. That didn’t register. Meanwhile the concerns of a highly credible public-health expert were described as “armchair” expertise.

Hobbes’s complaint: The classical and Renaissance rhetoricians equated the good orator with the good citizen — Quintilian’s vir civilis, the man fit to govern cities by his counsel. In Tudor England mastery of the studia humanitatis helped legitimise the gentry’s claim on government. Eloquence could therefore qualify a man to be heard on any subject, while mastery of a particular field could disqualify him. The schoolmaster Roger Ascham discouraged mathematics on the ground that men wholly bent on such sciences prove “unfit to live with others, & how unapte to serve in the world.” To paraphrase Michael Gove (admittedly unfairly and out of context), he’d “had enough of experts.”

The complaint today: Irving Janis’s account of groupthink explains how anyone arguing against group consensus meets direct pressure. Rather than being answered, they have their motives or temperament questioned.

Hobbes’s complaint: William Cavendish’s 1611 A Discourse Against Flatterie offers a catalogue of ways to dismiss a person by redescribing his virtues as faults. Honesty becomes fastidious eccentricity; gravity, dullness; repentance, superstitious melancholy. The objection is never answered; the objector is simply redescribed as the sort of person whose objection need not be taken seriously. Hobbes, then Cavendish’s tutor, later revived one of these examples in Leviathan.[15]

The complaint today: Mike Bracken, writing on his Whitehall experience trying to embed digital capabilities into government, describes endless policy cycles of carefully controlled documents circulating between private offices and departments, in which — his own gloss — “Rarely, if ever, does user need get a look-in.” With users unrepresented by anyone with standing in the system, their needs have no practical way of counting.

Hobbes’s complaint: Hobbes’s own 1660s account of why his science of justice made no difference: it had been demonstrated from principles evident to the meanest capacity and was nevertheless “cover’d and kept under here by a cloud of adversaries,” since most people learn their politics from the pulpit. He concedes that the democratical gentlemen who beat him had no arguments at all, only enormous rhetorical skill — and concludes that reason has little chance of being heard against interest, and that the most pernicious doctrine will beat the clearest proof if pressed with sufficient force.[16]

[1] This essay grew out of my reading of Quentin Skinner’s account of Hobbes’s fascination with and horror of rhetoric in 17th-century England. Skinner argues that Hobbes, after an early humanist phase, turned against rhetoric but then decided that, if he couldn’t beat the rhetoricians, he should join them, and made his masterwork, Leviathan, rhetorical with a vengeance.

I was struck by the similarity between Hobbes’s concerns about the befuddlement of public thought by rhetoric and my own about the saturation of contemporary discussion of public life by spin and bullshit. The essay began with my asking Claude to document the first version of the appendix to this essay, from which I drafted the essay.

The Hobbes material throughout is drawn principally from Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge University Press, 1996), with page references given in the notes.

[2] Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 25, pp. 179–80, quoted and discussed in Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 345–46.

[3] Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 284–85, on Hobbes’s stigmatising of the art of rhetoric as a cause of the dissolution of commonwealths, in The Elements of Law, part II, ch. 8 and De Cive XII.

[4] Hobbes, Behemoth, or the Long Parliament, quoted from the St John’s College Oxford manuscript in Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 432–34.

[5] See Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 41–42, on judicial rhetoric’s concern with past actions.

[6] Castiglione, Il Cortegiano, in Hoby’s translation of 1561, on the courtier’s duty to inform his prince frankly of the truth of any matter he needs to understand; see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 66–87, on the ideal and its English reception.

[7] Indeed, perhaps it’s a sign of the times that the Catholic adversarial office was wound back in 1983, and canonisations grew a great deal more frequent: John Paul II canonised close to five hundred people, whereas all his twentieth-century predecessors together had canonised ninety-eight.

[8] Skinner argues that having completely repudiated rhetoric in The Elements of Law and De Cive, Hobbes changed course in Leviathan, trying to beat the rhetoricians at their own game by incorporating their persuasive arts into his civil science. See Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 327–425.

[9] Hobbes, De Cive X.xi, quoted and translated in Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, p. 270.

[10] Hobbes, De Cive XII.xii, quoted in Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, p. 270; and The Elements of Law, part II, ch. 8, quoted at pp. 269–70, on amplification and extenuation.

[11] Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 283–84, summarising Hobbes’s reversal of the rhetoricians’ formula; the underlying text is De Cive XII.xii.

[12] Humfrey Braham, The Institution of a Gentleman (1555), borrowing Sallust’s complaint that we have lost the true names of things; Stefano Guazzo, La civil conversazione (1574), on an age in which courtesy is read as flattery; Ben Jonson, Catiline (1611), chorus to Act IV. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 167–68 and 178, notes that both forms of the corruption were taken to be gaining ground; his summary judgement is at p. 179.

[13] Hobbes, The Elements of Law, part II, ch. 8, quoted in Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 269–70. On loci communes as storehouses of pre-existing argument, and Hobbes’s assault on the doctrine, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 113–17 and 262–63.

[14] Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), preface, discussed in Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, p. 263. On Hobbes’s service to Bacon, Skinner, pp. 225, 236–37.

[15] William Cavendish, A Discourse Against Flatterie (London: Walter Burre, 1611), pp. 41–42, quoted in Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, p. 169. Cavendish deleted the passage when revising for Horae Subsecivae (1620); Hobbes, his tutor and secretary from 1608 and possibly the source of the example, restored it in Leviathan, ch. 4, forty years later (pp. 169–70, 340–41). The catalogue of the Detractor is in Cavendish’s essay “Of detraction” (1620), quoted at p. 170.

[16] Hobbes, Behemoth, quoted in Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 432–34.

<https://nicholasgruen.substack.com/p/hobbes-on-spin-and-bullshit> <https://nicholasgruen.substack.com>

Brad DeLong here: Nicholas Gruen says that we are worse off than we were in Thomas Hobbes’s day. In many ways, we are. Back then rhetoric was adversarial and often focused on the past as much s the future. Opposing advocates contested the appraisal of deeds already done, so anyone making a case spoke expecting to be contradicted. On July 24, 1858, Abraham Lincoln wrote to Stephen A. Douglas asking:

Abraham Lincoln: <https://papersofabrahamlincoln.org/documents/D201056b>: ‘Will it be agreeable to you to make an arrangement for you and myself to divide time, and address the same audiences the present canvass? Mr. Judd, who will hand you this, is authorized to receive your answer; and, if agreeable to you, to enter into the terms of such arrangement…

And Douglas agreed. Within a week <https://papersofabrahamlincoln.org/documents/D201067> they had set up seven debates between the man who would be chosen as U.S. Senator from Illinois if the Democrats were to emerge from the fall election with the Illinois-Senate majority and the man who would be chosen if the Republicans were to emerge. The opener was to speak for 60 minutes, followed by a 90 minute rebuttal and then a 30 minute surrebuttal. Douglas and Lincoln were to switch openings debate by debate. These bear no resemblance to the modern “debates” that candidates’ handlers setup,. (In large part, I think, because handlers have little confidence in their candidates and think the risk of having something that is not a joint press conference with little or no follow-up is too great.)

Thus we have this: contemporary anxieties about “spin” are 350-year-old news. And we have this: the distinctive modern pathology is unopposed rhetoric: values statements and PR that pre-empt criticism as they are designed to never face an advocate on the other side.

Now do consider modern science’s own prestige hierarchies, replication crises, and capture by funding interests. Those do tell us that “prestige follows evidence” is aspirational. And it is not true that modern institutional speech faces “no adversary”: we have journalism, litigation, regulators, social media pile-ons, whistleblowers, and o on. Evidence and “front-line learning” do not point to determinate answers that merely lack standing. Disagreement is, often, genuinely about values or truly contested facts. It is only a fuzzy middle for which framing certain things as “facts” and devaluing others can move opinion needles.

But I found this very much worth reading this morning.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

This is all there is that it will show me:

So it is nice that this below exists—although this is out of date, from eight months ago, which is I don’t know what fifty-six dog years? It run through the roughly 90% off pricing for your first $200/month of use for the “Pro” tier, and roughly 93% off for your first $1500 or $3000/month of use for theMax 5x” or “Max 20x” tiers:

Share

<https://she-llac.com/claude-limits> <https://she-llac.com/>

If you’re reading this, you’re probably aware that Claude’s subscription plans are a much better deal than the API. But how much better exactly, and what are the actual limits? I pulled out the exact values through two unrounded floats and found some notable things. I’ll explain how I did it later, but first, the results.

The 20× plan is not as good of a deal as you might expect. On Anthropic’s site, all mentions of “20× more usage*” have that pesky asterisk. It’s doing a lot of work. The five-hour session limits really are 20× higher than in Pro, but the real question is, how much work can you get out of it? The answer is: only twice as much per week as the 5× plan.

On the other hand, the 5× plan gives you great value for money. It overdelivers on what it promises pretty significantly. It’s the sweet spot of the pricing table. You get a six times higher session limit than Pro (not five), and more than eight times the weekly limit (more than the eponymous five).

Compared to API pricing, all plans come out looking fantastic. The value estimates in the table are lower bounds, since caching makes the effective API-equivalent even more favorable (as I’ll explain in a moment). In any case, if you can use plan pricing instead of the API, go for it.

There’s one thing that’s not in this table that’s very important.

Cache reads. They’re entirely free.

This makes the math even more stacked in favor of the plans. In an agentic loop (e.g. Claude Code), the model makes dozens of tool calls per turn. After every tool call, the model is invoked again. Cache read of the entire context. The API charges 10% for every read; subscriptions charge nothing. This adds up fast, as we’ll see in a second.

Cache writes are also discounted, they cost 1.25×/2×1 the input price in the API, while on the plan they’re charged the regular input price. Every chat turn gets written to cache before it can be read, so this matters as well.

So what are these credits I keep talking about?

They’re the unit used internally to keep track of your plan usage. “Credits” is my arbitrary name for it, these values don’t appear directly in any API field so there’s no obvious word for them. I think “credits” sounds fine.

How do we get from credits to token counts? Here’s the formula:

credits_used = ceil(input_tokens × input_rate + output_tokens × output_rate)

...and the values you plug into it:

The specific values are pretty arbitrary-looking, but the ratios between them mirror API pricing: output costs 5× input, you’ll pay 5× more for Opus than Haiku, etc.

Let’s try it out on some practical numbers.

We’ll start with the realistic worst case: caching is enabled, but the cache is cold. (The true worst case is caching disabled entirely, but that’s rare.)

This is already great value, and it’s the real-world baseline (even with caching off, it was still ~13×). Once you’re in a loop and the cache is warm, it gets a lot better:

Notice we only count the 1K new tokens on the subscription side. On the API side, the 100K cache read still costs 10% of input.

Over thirty-six times more value than the API.

Okay, enough of the takeaways. I promised suspiciously precise floats.

How did I get all these numbers?

Last fall, a new tab appeared on the Claude.ai settings page. The usage tab, showing your remaining limits as two progress bars.2 Very soon after, I found myself flipping back and forth between my Claude chats and that page. Especially if your chats are long (and uncached, but that’s a different story), those limits can run out quick.

I decided to make an extension.3 First, I looked at how the usage page itself was implemented. Pretty straightforward, a /usage endpoint returning a tiny JSON snippet with the numbers rounded to the nearest percentage point. That was enough for me, since what I really wanted was an easier way to view those numbers.

But I kept digging, and soon found something interesting. On a Max 5× account, the SSE responses from the generation endpoint had usage values as unrounded doubles: 0.16327272727272726.

Suspiciously specific. Almost looks like some kind of fraction converted to decimal. Can we recover the underlying fraction and get the real limits? Turns out we can.

When a real number becomes a float, it rounds to the nearest representable value. That float represents ALL rationals in a tiny interval [L, U) that would round to it. The width of that interval is ~10−17 for values in the 0–1 range we’re working with.4

The original fraction (before it became a float) must lie in that [L, U). We want to get the simplest fraction from that interval.

Why the simplest? Any decimal fraction can be converted to a common one, but that doesn’t give us any more info (in this example: 16327272727272726/100000000000000000). What we want to get is the original (which presumably has a denominator smaller than 100 quadrillion).

But wait, suppose the source fraction is 2/10, we would recover 1/5! Won’t getting the simplest fractions give us false positives? With one sample, yes. This is why we get multiple samples and later compute the lowest common denominator. If the true denominator were 10, we’d sometimes recover 5 or 2 (because everything gets simplified), but we’d never recover a denominator that doesn’t divide 10. So the LCM can only grow, it can’t overshoot the real limit. After a few samples, the chance of the real denominator being higher becomes vanishingly small.

So back to the bucket, how do we find the simplest fraction in it?

The Stern-Brocot tree is a binary search over ALL positive fractions, ordered by value, but constructed so that simpler fractions are found first. Starting from 0/1 and 1/0 (infinity), each step narrows toward the target interval. Here’s an example for finding the fraction for 0.4:

In our use-case, we’re not aiming for the exact number, but instead a very very small interval (~10−17). The process looks essentially identical either way.

Back to our original 0.16327272727272726. The first in-bucket hit is a very small-denominator fraction (often the minimum-denominator one):

Round-trip check: 449/2750 prints as 0.16327272727272726 ✓

Each sample gives a denominator. The true limit D must be divisible by all of them. Example: 449/2750 and 11401/75000 both scale to a denominator of 3,300,000.

Why does the limit have to be divisible by all of them? Because the utilization number is literally “used / limit”. When we recover a fraction from the float, we get it simplified. So the denominator we recover can only be a divisor of the real limit.

So you take a few samples, collect the denominators, and take their LCM. At first it will jump around. Then it stops. Once it stops across a bunch of different usage amounts, that LCM is your limit. You can still get unlucky, but after a few samples the odds get really small.

Lastly, how did I get the credit-token formulas and model multipliers? A whole bunch of manual data collection, then automated data collection after I modded my extension to save that data as I chatted. I put them all in a table and stared at them a lot. Asked Claude. Asked GPT. Came up with hypotheses, tested them, and ultimately ended up with the tables and formula above. I wish I had more to say on this but it was a bit of a chaotic process and I didn’t keep notes on it, the important part is that I’ve validated the final numbers and they check out exactly.

Side channels are everywhere. I don’t think anyone at Anthropic expected to leak their exact pricing table just by forgetting to round two numbers.

You should get a plan if you can. Claude Code on API pricing just doesn’t make financial sense compared to the plans for most people. The main exception is if you’re forced onto the API for organizational reasons (enterprise/team setups, procurement, etc.), in which case the comparison is less relevant.

If you care about Claude’s usage limits (and you’re at the bottom of an article that extensively explains them, so I assume you do), try my Claude Counter extension. It shows you the cache timer, the usage bars right in the composer box (with full precision) and more.

As of writing, the floats remain unrounded and suspiciously precise. I expect if this post gets any attention, that might not last very long. I’ll be a little sad about it because it’ll make my extension slightly worse. (I’ll have to rely on the /usage endpoint, the same one the official usage page uses, which is rounded)

Comments on Hacker News or Twitter.

1 1.25× for 5 minute cache, 2× for 1 hour cache.

2 Yeah, I know it’s 3 on the Max plans.

3 To be fair, first I found an existing one that I kept modifying until it didn’t make sense anymore and I rewrote it from scratch with a different focus from the original.

4 IEEE-754 floats have a fixed number of mantissa bits, so precision is relative to magnitude. Larger floats have wider rounding buckets: ~10−17 for 0.1, ~10−16 for 1.0, ~10−13 for 1000. Our usage ratios are always 0–1, so we’re in the ~10−17 zone.

5 1. Write down the problem. 2. Think very hard. 3. Write down the solution.

“SternBrocotTree.svg” by Aaron Rotenberg, modified and used under CC BY-SA 3.0 (source: Wikimedia Commons).

<https://she-llac.com/claude-limits> <https://she-llac.com/>

Brad DeLong here: My sense is that, what with all of Anthropic’s opaque moving pricing parts, Anthropic has maintained the rough relative relationship between subscriptions and API’s in terms of pricing-per-output-token, while delivering about 50% more value per dollar charged on the API tier. The subscription tiers are still enormous loss leaders: $20/month for your first $200/month of tokens at API rates for the “Pro” tier, and $100 or $200/month for your first $1500 or $3000/month of tokens at the “Max 5x” or “Max 20x” tiers.

Give a gift subscription

What are the implications of this, for “AI” as a technology, as a source of user surplus, as a source of producer value, and as a source of financier, engineer, and investor fortunes?

If you are worried that a bull-statue is a Satanic symbol, the odds are very high that you think that Israel must be encouraged to conquer from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates, so that then the monstrous powers of Gog and Magog will attack and destroy them, as payback for and as a demonstration to the world of God’s wrath at them for their sin of rejecting Jesus Christ.

Such people are unlikely to make good judgments about Middle East issues. Perhaps half of Trump State Department political appointees are such people.

Share

Via Dan Drezner:

Marc Caputo: Ba’al Out: Top Diplomat’s Worry About Pagan God Elicits Eye Rolls <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-beclowning-of-the-state-department>: ‘The second-most powerful man at the State Department put the brakes on a U.S. international exhibit featuring a bull statue because he worried it might look like Baal, a pagan god some associate with Satanic child sacrifice. The anecdote illustrates the quirky interests of Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau…. The bull statue was put on hold as State officials spent the last few weeks debating how to make it both interesting and non-Satanic. “It’s just totally weird stuff and it’s really indicative of the guy,” a State Department official said. “Literally, no one thinks about Baal unless they’re spending way too much time online, which Landau is,” a different U.S. official lamented. “It’s like an episode of Veep. Someone should tell him this is a Western bull, not a Near East bull,” a third U.S. official said…

Give a gift subscription

who comments: “Remember: when it comes to Trump’s foreign policy and national security team, it’s incompetents all the way down”.

We won’t even get into the fact that in the most ancient religions of Canaan and Israel, the bull is primarily a symbol of God Most High, not of the subordinate Ba’al Haddad

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

A number that I very much want to see, and now that I see it I wonder how solid it is. All such counterfactuals are dicey:

Share

Torsten Slok: Not Tech, Not Wall Street <https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/not-tech-not-wall-street>: ‘The income that lifted America’s top 1% did not come mainly from tech or Wall Street, according to The Everywhere Millionaire. More than half of the rise in the top 1% income share since 1985, 5.8 of 10.5 percentage points, flowed through pass-through businesses, see chart below. The authors, Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, counted roughly 3 million wealthy private business owners, with average net worth near $25 million, running law firms, car dealerships, medical practices, commercial contractors and regional restaurant chains, the kind of businesses that make their owners wealthy and well known in their own communities without ever making them nationally famous.

The Reagan Revolution was supposed to be a bargain: the rich would get to be richer—to after taxes keep more of “their earnings”—in exchange for unleashing wave after wave of innovation to drive more rapid economic growth to restore the growth rates of the 1950s and 1960s. Everyone would win!

Everyone did not win:

Oh, the superrich—the plutocrats and the kleptocrats—won super-big from the Reagan Revolution, and the gentry won big. But not the rest of us. The growth rates of the 1950s and 1960s were not restored, The Reagan-Bush I record was not “seven fat years”, but seven moderate sandwiched between two bad and then three bad ones, adding up to a trend growth rate about what we have experienced since the end of the GFC-triggered Great Recession. The policy configuration and economic-structural configuration that did—somewhat—restore growth was the left-neoliberal Clinton Doctrine, which was then dismantled by Bush II, the GFC and Great Recession, and the ænemic post-2009 response. As far as growth in incomes for non-superrich non-gentry are concerned, the only bright spot is the 2021-2022 Biden pedal-to-the-metal recovery which prevented another downward lurch in trend income growth like the ones we saw under Nixon, under Bush II, and then with the GFC-Great Recession:

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Retired General Barry McCaffrey says the US has “probably permanently lost access to 15 Persian Gulf bases”.

<https://rickperlstein.substack.com/p/bushs-war-is-finally-over> <https://rickperlstein.substack.com>

One of the not-original points I will be making in The Infernal Triangle: How America Got This Way is one stressed by the CIA’s Al Qaeda expert Mike Scheuer in the years after 9/11: that, far from attacking the U.S. because of some vague hatred of “our freedom,” as George W. Bush liked to say, but instead be a use of his “hatred for a few specific U.S. policies and actions,” most prominently that George H.W. Bush persuaded Saudi royal family to turn the birthplace of Islam and home to its holiest shrines into a base to wage war against Muslims. Perpetuating that, Scheuer argued, guaranteed Islamic militancy would keep metastasizing, including among those not yet radicalized…

<https://rickperlstein.substack.com/p/bushs-war-is-finally-over> <https://rickperlstein.substack.com>

Brad DeLong here: And there the Rickipedia paywall sets in. Below the fold he, first, makes the point that the terrorists hoped to terrorize us and succeeded:

“Terror wants derangement”—and so we gave it to them, and in the silliest of ways… surr[endering] the possibility of a disciplined approach to regional security in the Middle East by lashing out, serially, in dumb wars…making America more solipsistic, narcissistic, recriminatory, cruel, cowardly… it takes a cowardly nation, after all, to elect and reelect a strongman like Donald J. Trump)…. Now, however… the great Lucian Truscott IV puts [it] forth… far blunter…

And here is an extended quote from Truscott:

Lucian Truscott IV: Osama bin Laden’s dream come true: U.S. bases on the Arabian Peninsula are gone <https://luciantruscott.substack.com/p/osama-bin-ladens-dream-come-true>: ‘It took him 25 years, but Osama bin Laden is winning his war on the Great Satan. He wanted to bring to an end the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, and it is happening. Retired four-star General Barry McCaffrey assessed recently that the U.S. military has “probably permanently lost access to 15 Persian Gulf bases,” due to Trump’s war on Iran. The Pentagon Inspector General, in a report released today, said that “hundreds” of buildings on U.S. bases across the Middle East were destroyed by Iranian attacks that also caused $184 million in damages to diplomatic facilities in the region. All that damage was caused by thousands of missiles and drones fired by Iran.

Two F-15 fighters were destroyed during the war, along with one A-10 fighter. Five KC-135 refueling aircraft were destroyed on the ground, along with numerous helicopters. At least 30 Predator drones were destroyed “in various circumstances,” including being hit by drones and missiles while they were on the ground. The Pentagon has not released the number of Navy and Army weapons systems that were destroyed where they were deployed on U.S. bases, but it has been reported that several radar systems that cost in the billions of dollars were destroyed by Iranian missiles in Saudi Arabia…

With some CBS News pictures.

With a quote: “These are not ‘squirters’ getting through”, referring to the claims of moronic Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “We’re not defending these bases. We’re just watching them get destroyed…”

And there is a thoroughly weird piece on this from the Stimson Center:

Kristian Alexander: The Future of US Basing in the Gulf After the 2026 Iran War <https://www.stimson.org/2026/the-future-of-us-basing-in-the-gulf-after-the-2026-iran-war/>: ‘The old equation that American presence equals reduced vulnerability was temporarily inverted. This does not mean the bases failed. They supported defensive operations, intelligence collection, logistics, and the projection of U.S. power under wartime conditions. But the conflict punctured the assumption that fixed facilities could function as protected rear areas. Bases, radars, communications nodes, fuel stores, and intelligence installations became elements of the front line….

Iranian attacks reportedly inflicted billions of dollars in damage…. Iran… identif[ied] and attack[ed] the nervous system of the American posture… sensors and intelligence nodes…. Successful defense… bec[a]me strategically costly… [as] relatively inexpensive drones, decoys, and missiles… compel[ed] defenders to use scarce interceptors… [as] even a few penetrating weapons… damage costly sensors or concentrated equipment….

A U.S. base is an instrument of American power projection and deterrence, but it is not automatically a defense guarantee for its host. Gulf governments will consequently seek greater clarity over consultation, protection, and risk-sharing…

As I understand it, Diego Garcia 3000 and Muwaffaq Salti in Jordan 900 miles from Tehran are the logistics bases, with strikes being now launched form carriers and from Muwaffaq Salti; and with few if any air assets positioned at any of Al Udeid in Qatar, Al Dhafra in UAE, Prince Sultan, or Ali Al Salem, Camp Arifjan, or Camp Buehring, due to their vulnerability.

If this is true, how is this these bases not failing?

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Spencer Ackerman on how the “Houthis”, that is Ansar Allah, have now beaten three adversaries in a decade, seized Yemen’s western coast and an island commanding the Bab el-Mandeb, exposed the hollowness of the U.S. security umbrella, and appear fierce enough for Trump to refuse Mohammed bin-Salman’s calls for help. Chokepoints re-price geography permanently, credibility is the real currency of naval hegemony, and coherence beats incoherence.

Share

<https://www.forever-wars.com/fanute-the-houthi-coup/?ref=forever-wars-newsletter>

One decade. Three adversaries. Total domination. It’s time to respect Ansar Allah

Edited by Sam Thielman

LAST YEAR, I wrote for Zeteo that the Houthis won their Biden-ordered confrontation with the U.S. Navy (sorry, a “multinational naval coalition”) once the Trump administration reached for a deal. The Navy waged its most sustained naval campaign since World War II—that’s according to then-Fifth Fleet commander Adm. Brad Cooper, whose defeat did not impede his ascension atop U.S. Central Command. Not even that could compel Ansar Allah (the organization shorthanded as “the Houthis”) to cease their attacks on Red Sea shipping. Ansar Allah attacked Red Sea shipping to impose costs on Israel, and its foreign patrons, to compel it to end its genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. Rather than do that, the U.S. bombed Ansar Allah. And lost.

I got pushback on that piece. There’s always, in the United States, ways to explain why an adversary success/an American loss doesn’t count. The end of the U.S. mission in the Red Sea came, generally speaking, without any acknowledgement that the Houthis notched a victory, as opposed to the Americans pulling up stakes. Yet the reality remains that the Houthis imposed their political will on Red Sea shipping, rather than the Americans imposing their will on the Houthis and returning Red Sea shipping lanes to the status quo ante from October 7, 2023. That is what it is to win wars, rather than simply to wage them. My hot take is that the part of American military culture that overstates tactical success and underrates strategic success, so persistent over so many decades and so many wars, originates with the former Confederacy’s need to believe its own myth of martial valor. [There’s a lot of culpability to go around on that one but Hudson Strode’s perfidious biography of Jefferson Davis, which Shelby Foote loved, is probably guiltier than most.—Sam.]

Last week Ansar Allah shocked the world. With their decade-long war against the Saudis back on, they intensified their Red Sea blockade on Saudi oil exports by barrelling down the western coast of Yemen, taking it all from Riyadh-backed forces theoretically belonging to the long-ousted pre-Houthi “government” of Yemen in exile. (That government, formally known as the Presidential Leadership Council, is so enfeebled that it constantly refers to itself as the Internationally Recognized Government, or IRG. Never a good sign!) First they seized the crucial port city of Mokha–yes, like the coffee—whose defenders fled. Adding to the embarrassment for the IRG, Mokha had been held by the nephew of U.S.-backed longtime strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh, whom the Arab Spring dispatched. Ansar Allah won a military victory with enormous symbolic power. Read Iona Craig’s dispatch for Drop Site, as she knows Yemen extremely well. She called Ansar Allah’s southwestern push “the most significant shift in territorial control in five years of the country’s long-running civil war.”

Then, on Friday, in a stunning move, Ansar Allah conducted an amphibious assault and took an island in the mouth of the Bab el-Mandeb.

Amphibious assault—coming onto land from the sea as an invading force—is the most perilous maneuver in warfare. You’re barrelling into the mouth of an entrenched defense that will surely hold the high ground and fire upon you as you seek to come ashore, while your ability to fend off an attack through air power or naval artillery as your forces hit the beach is minimal. Amphibious assault is an established core competency of the U.S. Marine Corps. For extremely understandable reasons, they desire to do it as little as humanly possible.

I have yet to see a proper account of how assault unfolded and what, if any, resistance Ansar Allah overcame. Even if the island were undefended, putting fighters on speedboats to take an island in the middle of a commercially pivotal waterway is audacious to the point of legend. Ansar Allah has drones, but no known aviation assets otherwise to defend their assault. There will be movies made about this some day. Just not in English.

Now Ansar Allah holds the Bab el-Mandeb for real. That puts the Iran coalition in control of two of the world’s most important waterways.

In addition to losing export access through Bab el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz, the Saudis had to shut down the east-west oil pipeline, owing to an attack said to originate from Iraq. That shutdown takes up to 7 million barrels per day of oil offline. Remember my piece looking at the geography of Mideast conflict to come, the one that envisions routing oil to the Eastern Mediterranean? Events are coalescing in its predictive direction.

And in another historic move, one that tears up the premise of the U.S.-Saudi alliance, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman asked Trump for assistance and Trump said no.

Now, the U.S. is already deeply complicit in the long Saudi war against the people of Yemen. I would never argue that the U.S. ought to return to it because MBS needs to be saved from the consequences of his own actions. Instead I mean to observe that the deal between Riyadh and Washington since 1945 has been that the U.S. military safeguards the Saudi state in exchange for cheap and abundant oil priced in dollars. Already the Iranian counterstrategy in this war has been to expose the hollowness of the U.S. security umbrella over the Middle East. Trump has demonstrated American unreliability under fire far more vividly than any military withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan. (Then Pakistan and Turkey refused to let the Mecca Pact bail MBS out! Ansar Allah is pulling card after card!)

Remember how the Axis of Resistance was supposed to have been weak? Barely two years after the Israeli sabotage of the Hezbollah pagers, the Iranian coalition has in its hands a substantial amount of global energy exports. And a whole lot of the credit needs to go to the very poorly understood commanders of Ansar Allah.

I AM NOT saying that as a man who smugly thinks he understands them. I’m saying that as someone who wants to understand Ansar Allah and finds English-language insight wanting. Too often “the Houthis” appear in U.S. media as angry, gun-waving fanatics, usually just before journalists identify them as being under the Iranian sway. But every halfway-informed portrayal of Ansar Allah instead situates them as substantially independent of Tehran. As I briefly wrote in my Zeteo piece, there is a longstanding debate within U.S. defense circles about how much of the Ansar Allah missile arsenal is domestically produced and how much is Iranian-supplied. Usually that debate is held in the context of presenting Iran as a regional threat. But it has the effect of suggesting Ansar Allah is fundamentally weak, in need of sponsorship and, in the final analysis, an afterthought to the greater issue of Iran.

That just cannot be true. Since the late-2014 Ansar Allah coup that ousted the U.S. and Saudi-backed government, Ansar Allah has held Sana’a, the port of Hodeidah and much of Yemen’s northwestern territory, mostly under conditions of a pitiless siege. For practically every day of its hold on power it has fought more powerful and technologically advanced adversaries, and won. Ansar Allah has defeated forces backed by the Emiratis known as the Southern Transitional Council, as well as the Saudi-backed fighters; endured airstrikes by the Saudis; and absorbed naval artillery and airstrikes from the United States. It has done so while scaling up its military capabilities. And it picks its engagements impressively, with a fingertip-feel for moving its opponents into no-win situations. Trump, for instance, reached a ceasefire with the Houthis after their resilience following his escalation left him with the unpalatable option of sending forces ashore into Yemen.

These guys, in other words, show every sign of having farsighted generals. People worth studying. (People worth, at a minimum, knowing by name!)

But that’s not how the U.S. military rolls when it comes to its adversaries, despite priding itself on being a learning organization. If you read this 2013 WIRED piece of mine, you’ll see that the Army never bothered to study what the Iraq War looked like from the perspective of the insurgency, even though there were lots of opportunities to see the war through Iraqi eyes. I remember once talking to a since-passed friend about his experiences fighting the Taliban on multiple tours in Afghanistan’s east. His assessment: mediocre riflemen, expert mortarmen. He was an enlisted man, and as is often the case, his focus was correct while the Army’s was blinkered. It didn’t understand the Afghanistan war that its enemies waged. It barely understood the war it waged, and that’s being generous.

Now I know what some will say. We didn’t REALLY fight Ansar Allah in 2024-5. They never went up against the Army or the Marines. OK, and? That just meant Ansar Allah successfully leveraged Washington’s unwillingness to deploy ground forces when it encountered the U.S. in the Red Sea. I call that good generalship. War isn’t a matter of reading off capabilities from a fucking Magic The Gathering card to decide the outcome of a battle. Ansar Allah has now triumphed over three different adversaries, adversaries who cumulatively devastated Yemen, and it is in a stronger position than ever. You can coulda-woulda-shoulda this all you want and it won’t change that.

Somewhere in a leadership position in Ansar Allah is the Yemeni equivalent of Võ Nguyên Giáp, the master strategist who commanded the North Vietnamese forces. (And whom the U.S. didn’t respect until long after withdrawing from Vietnam.) I would like to know what this Yemeni general’s name is. If he’s really more like multiple people in a military council, I’d like to learn all their names and what their deals are. He has/they have a lot of insight into how war is fought in the Middle East against impossibly technologically superior forces. And I think we can see more clearly than ever what ignoring that insight has yielded.

<https://www.forever-wars.com/fanute-the-houthi-coup/?ref=forever-wars-newsletter>

Brad DeLong here: The piece of realist good advice everyone repeats and almost no one interrogates is look at the prince’s constraints, not his preferences. That fails us here. The rule smuggles in the assumption that the prince is minimally rational, goal-directed, and has enough power and vision to set his internal political balancing-act on the domestic see-saw to one side enough that his behavior integrates over time into something you can call a strategy. In the context of the actual Washington of last week, that smuggled assumption is really stupid.. We do not have a goal-directed prince. We have a volatile prince worked by whoever last got him on the phone. His “constraints” are re-scrambled every news cycle.

Against that, Ansar Allah appears to understand and be able to carry out the unfortunate human social practice of war. It appears to have farsighted generals running a patient, coherent, long-run campaign against adversaries that cannot hold to a policy line. In a contest between a coherent weak actor and an incoherent strong one, bet on coherence. So I said last spring, in my confused notes on the war on Iran, and I am more convinced now.

The maritime chokepoint is the game. Yemen matters, strategically, for America because of the United States’s two essential strategic concerns: Persian Gulf oil and the Red Sea/Suez maritime transport artery. Ansar Allah controlling the western coast of Yemen and putting fighters on speedboats into the mouth of the Bab el-Mandeb promotes the ongoing Yemen from humanitarian tragedy to global strategic consequence.

Freedom of navigation is a global public good, and public goods decay the instant their provider is revealed to be unwilling to pay for them. The “American peace” on the water was never mainly a matter of firepower. It was a matter of credibility—veryone believing that the United States would eat the cost of keeping the commons open, would answer the distress call, would show up. Ackerman is right that Trump, in telling Mohammed bin Salman no, “demonstrated American unreliability under fire far more vividly than any withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan.” A withdrawal is a choice about where to spend your credibility. Failing to answer a client’s distress call is a repudiation of the premise that you have any to spend.

I part company with Ackerman on one thing. I do not think his Confederate-martial-valor thesis is right. He claims that American military culture’s habit of overrating the tactical and underrating the strategic traces to the postbellum South’s need to believe its own myth. The chronology is off. That myth was always a very narrow thing: a fixation on three battles in Northern Virginia across the nine months beginning in mid-August 1862: Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville. Otherwise, Lee’s generalship was uninspired:

• butt his head against a brick wall over and over again at the Seven Days, and win only because McClellan could not believe that Lee would accept such unfavorable tactical casualty ratios unless he had substantial numerical superiority;

• divide his army in the face of the enemy in hostile territory with insufficient reconnaissance before Antietam, and only George McClellan’s case of the slows saved the Army of Northern Virginia from a rout never seen in the Civil War.

• divide his army again in the face of the enemy in hostile territory with insufficient reconnaissance before Gettysburg, and then his frantic attempts to reconcentrate brings on the most unfortunate meeting engagement followed by bonheaded futile frontal assault of the entire war.

• never regain any strategic or even effective tactical initiative thereafter.

Give a gift subscription

The systematic pathology — did we win the engagement, hit the target, sink the boat? in place of did the other side end up doing what we wanted? — is a Vietnam-era acquisition. It is the disease that let a generation of officers count bodies while Võ Nguyên Giáp counted decades, and it is the disease that has us today unable to name the general who just took an island in the Bab el-Mandeb.

Now it is time to watch oil supply, demand, and prices. Seven million barrels a day offline, Hormuz contested, Bab el-Mandeb closed, the east-west pipeline shut. Ackerman’s own earlier piece on routing oil to the Eastern Mediterranean now looks prescient. Chokepoint risk does more than spike the spot price for a season. It re-prices geography permanently: it redirects the next decade of pipeline and terminal investment and hands a windfall to whoever sits on the alternative route. The durable consequence of last week is a redrawn global petroleum energy map. And maps drawn under duress may stay drawn that way.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

I see from Torsten Slok that yesterday Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick published their book The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There.

Share

Torsten Slok: The Zip Codes That Don't Make the News <https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/the-zip-codes-that-do-not-make-the-news>: ‘The 400 wealthiest Americans on the annual Forbes list hold about $4 trillion in combined wealth, while the far larger group of private business owners with at least $10 million in net worth holds $46.7 trillion…. Most top-end wealth in the US does not sit with a few household names but with millions of business owners in towns and mid-size cities across the country…

Give a gift subscription

And, indeed, at today’s Berkeley Economics Department faculty lunch, Danny Yagan, Jon Steinsson, and I fell into a discussion of Owen and Eric’s great new book. Thus it is on my mind.

Leave a comment

My take: I have been waiting for someone to write this book for nearly five years, ever since I first read Patrick Wyman’s “American Gentry” piece back in the fall of 2020. This is the measured, quantified, administrative-data-backed portrait of who actually owns America, and it turns out that Patrick Wyman’s historian eyes, Yakima-born nose, and keen intuition had given him a truly key insight.

Wyman grew up in Yakima, Washington—“the self-proclaimed Palm Springs of Washington [State]”. It is a small-sized metro of ninety thousand souls sitting in a sea of orchards on the dry side of the Cascades. He noticed something about his hometown. That something is something that the standard American story about wealth and power simply does not see. The people who ran Yakima were not the international oligarchs of glass-walled penthouses and Hamptons compounds. Instead, they were the families who owned the fruit companies, the cold-storage units, the processing facilities, the commercial-construction firms that paved the roads on which the apples and cherries moved to market.

Their wealth ran into the millions and tens of millions, not the billions. And it derived—this is the crucial thing—not from their salaries but from their ownership of assets in the form of businesses that generated profits in the local economy:

Patrick Wyman: American Gentry: Local Power and the Social Order: This kind of elite’s wealth derives not from their salary—this is what separates them from even extremely prosperous members of the professional-managerial class, like doctors and lawyers—but from their ownership of assets. Those assets vary depending on where in the country we’re talking about; they could be a bunch of McDonald’s franchises in Jackson, Mississippi, a beef-processing plant in Lubbock, Texas, a construction company in Billings, Montana, commercial properties in Portland, Maine, or a car dealership in western North Carolina…

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

Reflecting on his own birthplace:

Yakima is a place I loved dearly… have returned to often… Most of my close classmates in high school… [live] in major metro areas… not our hometown…. The kinds of jobs they were now qualified for didn’t really exist in Yakima…. For a person lucky and accomplished enough to get one of those [few] reasonably affluent professional jobs, Yakima… isn’t a bad place to live…. But… a city… dominated by its wealthy, largely agricultural property-owning class… Commercial agriculture is a lucrative industry, at least for those who own the orchards, cold storage units, processing facilities, and the large businesses that cater to them. They have a trusted and reasonably well-paid cadre of managers and specialists…. There are an enormous number of organizations and institutions dedicated to advancing the interests of this gentry class…. The gentry class can and usually does wield significant power to shape society to their liking…

Get 75% off a group subscription

Wyman did the natural thing and reached for the category that fit. He called them the gentry, analogous to the post-feudal landlords of Britain in the commercial-society 1700s. And he insisted that the gentry are not an American peculiarity but a recurrent structural feature of hierarchical societies with property:

• the local civic elites of the Roman Empire,

• the landlords of late Han China,

• the numerous lower nobility of late medieval France,

• the thegns of Anglo-Saxon England,

• the Prussian Junkers,

• the planter class of the antebellum South.

Refer a friend

Anywhere you get hierarchy plus property, a gentry class precipitates out of the solution. They are, by definition, local élites: not resident in the political center, not holding the great offices of state, not counted among the very richest—but dominant, often crushingly so, in the places where most people actually live their lives.

OK. That is background: Now come Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick with the secret superpower of the economist: counting. The blurb for their book is:

Most people think the path to great wealth runs through Wall Street or Silicon Valley. We’re told you must be a Zuckerberg, a Musk, or a Jamie Dimon to get rich. But this story is wrong. Drawing on unprecedented data… and vivid real-life stories… from a self-made hot-dog stand billionaire to the heirs of an auto dealer… prosperity is more attainable, more widely distributed, and closer to home than we imagine. A multitude of Americans have built staggering fortunes by running often unglamorous businesses far from the spotlight. A quiet revolution in the business world―the rise of “pass-through” firms like S-corporations and partnerships―supercharged this wealth, channeling vast income directly to business owners rather than traditional corporations…

There are perhaps three million business owners outside of and two million households in tech and finance with at least five million dollars, and with a total aggregate wealth of $50 trillion, ten times that of the Forbes 400. Their money does not sit quietly in a bank account. It is the valuation of control over largely local highly productive value chains. There is a lovely phrase for them: the “stealthy wealthy”. And it converts itself into cultural and especially political influence, for these Main Street Millionaires are embedded in the places where they live. They sit on the hospital board and in the chamber of commerce. They fund state legislators’ campaigns. They take the mayor to lunch. And they hire the lobbyist who quietly ensures that the licensing rules, the zoning, the tax carve-outs, and the regulatory moats stay right where they are.

This is Mancur Olson’s world of distributional coalitions, rendered in flesh: actors who are simultaneously creating real value—building the businesses, employing the workers, growing the economic pie—and bending the rules of the game to secure a larger and larger slice of it for themselves. Both things are true at once. The discomfort of holding them together is the whole point. The productive entrepreneur and the rent-seeking power broker are, very often, the same person.

What Zidar and Zwick have done is to shine a light on where this gentry class actually comes from, how it accumulated what it has, and how much it takes home. It is not a lottery ticket. It is not, primarily, an inheritance. It is the slow compounding of a profitable, boring, closely-held business over decades. It is the cumulative not-dribbled away returns to skill, to sweat, to local knowledge, and to a defensible market position solidified by local political influence. Read one way, this is bracingly optimistic: the American Dream. You do not need a Stanford CS degree or venture funding to end up rich. You need a good local business, patience, thrift to live within your means, and thirty mostly good years.

The paths to prosperity are more numerous, and more prosaic, than we are trained to think by the business press and by the sheer gravitational pull of celebrity. The archetypal rich person is not a founder-CEO with a stock ticker and an authorized biography. He is a local beer distributor holding a territorial franchise that is, in effect, a small monopoly. He is a commercial HVAC contractor whose trucks you pass on the highway without a second glance. He is a restaurateur with nine locations. Ownership of auto dealerships, waste-hauling routes, insurance brokerages. For every public-company CEO whose compensation package makes the papers, there are more than a thousand private business owners sitting on wealth that is genuinely transformational for their security and lifestyle.

Zidar and Zwick stress the tax story. The rise of the everywhere millionaires was supercharged by a specific institutional change: the migration of American business out of the C-corporation and into the “pass-through” form, the S-corporations and partnerships whose income flows directly to their owners rather than being taxed at the corporate level. Two dates anchor the transformation. In 1986, the Reagan tax reform brought the top personal rate down below the corporate rate, and suddenly it made sense to reorganize your business so that you never paid tax at the business level at all. Then in 2017 the Trump upper-income tax cut delivered the biggest business tax cut in U.S. history, including the twenty-percent deduction for pass-through income. The American gentry’s fortunes, in other words, are in substantial part, a policy artifact. tThe policy that made them keeps being renewed, because the gentry have the local and national political muscle to renew it.

The bottom line: Patrick Wyman’s five-year-old intuition understated the case.

I find this framing very compelling. And to change gears, it gave me insight into the problems of Red America.

One overwhelming factor should make revitalization of America’s left-behind places easy-peasy. Those rich blue-state blue-city core of America’s economy are simply not building at a sufficient rate. There are negative incentives for those without strong knowledge-economy chops to move to prosperous blue territory. Plus there are powerful incentives for those who have their work-professional social networks already in place to move out of the blue-city blue-state core into blueish-purple cities in red states, if not to depressed solid red left-behind areas, where their immense wealth would go even further. Thus it ought to take only a small amount of pushing to create self-sustaining growth poles in places classified as “left-behind”.

But that factor is overwhelmed by: Brain Drain, as talented individuals who leave for education and short-term job opportunities in larger cities do not come back; Political & Cultural Isolation, as politicians and opinion leaders who want to both serve the local gentry class and gain local mass support magnify the cultural alienness of richer, more urban parts of the country; Limited Access to Technology: with the digital divide a major obstacle; Educational Disparities, as education is not a priority for either the red-state or the local non-urban governments, and workforce development for the info-biotech world is nowhere; Infrastructure Challenges in America are everywhere, but the biggest gaps are in the non-urban parts of red-state America; Limited Entrepreneurship & Innovation; as proprietors being people who have it made, and who more fear than think they can take advantage of change; Dependency on Single Industries, which makes prosperity very vulnerable to the “destruction” part of Schumpeter, and, empirically, it is quite hard for even highly productive blue-collar workers in one industrial cluster to find a way to apply their skills and energy elsewhere in the economy; Economic Transition, as it is next to impossible to build up new economic sectors ex nihilo. (This is the big advantage of the Big City, where at least the germ of lots of other industries is always present nearby.) Healthcare Access, a problem squared by the blocking of reproductive health services in red states. In a quarter of America, today, god help you if you start to miscarry late in pregnancy, for the state will treat you like a criminal; Vice Signalling, so if you try to start a growing-sector business in a non Big CIty part of a red state, and lots of people around you will try to find some way to take you down with glee.

Behind much of these blockages is this: A gentry-dominated yuppie-hostile local power structure makes efforts at development especially hazardous. The effectiveness of investments is contingent on meticulous implementation. Misallocation of resources, bureaucratic inefficiencies, and lack of local engagement—those are all but guaranteed in a world in which the local gentry are very comfortable with things as they are. While the economic rationale for investing in left-behind communities is sound, the practical bureaucratic challenges are truly formidable. And the gentry do like it that way. I really do not see a way forward here—any more than there was a way forward for the U.S. south up until the 1960s.

Thus my tentative and gloomy conclusion: a gentry-dominated, yuppie-hostile local power structure makes economic revitalization not just difficult but positively hazardous. The people who own the third-biggest construction company in some red-state metro, or the seventeen McDonald’s franchises in eastern Tennessee, are people who—as I put it then—“have it made, and who more fear than think they can take advantage of change.” Their interest is in the perpetuation of the local order that made them, not in the creative destruction that might unmake them. And politicians who want to serve that gentry class while also winning mass support have every incentive to change the subject from the failures of local economic growth to the cultural alienness of the distant, richer, bluer city. J.D. Vance building a career by attacking the culture of Ohio’s own cities is the type specimen.

Now Zidar and Zwick are careful to hold two truths at once. On the one hand, the existence of our five million-strong gentry class is genuinely good news about the American Dream. If you thought the game was wholly rigged and that there was no path upward except through the credentialed knowledge economy, the data reject that view. On the other hand, more shots at multi-millionairedom is a good thing only if the resulting concentration of local power does not curdle. And in the Red States, boy does it curdle!

So the appreciation I want to register is this. Wyman gave us the eyes to see the gentry—the historian’s recognition that the man with seventeen McDonald’s franchises belongs to the same sociological species as the Anglo-Saxon thegn and the Prussian Junker. Zidar and Zwick have done is the indispensable third thing: they have counted the gentry, traced the plumbing of the tax code that inflated them, and put a fifty-trillion-dollar number on a class that had been hiding in plain sight behind the billionaires.

The energy behind the authoritarian turn in American politics is, on the conventional and probably accurate reading, the rage of the left-behind. But the people who organize and monetize that rage—who translate it into car-dealer-friendly zoning, into transit legislation quietly strangled, into a permanent pass-through deduction paid for by cuts to food stamps—are very often the local gentry, the everywhere millionaires, the stealthy wealthy. You cannot understand the politics of the places that don’t matter until you understand who owns them. Zidar and Zwick have now told us, with numbers. Buy the book. Read it against Wyman.

And then ask the hard questions, centered around this: In principle, revitalizing left-behind places should be easy: wealth stretches further there, and blue-state cores aren’t building fast enough. In practice, a gentry-dominated, yuppie-hostile local power structure makes development positively hazardous. The people who own the seventeen McDonald’s franchises fear the creative destruction that might unmake them, and the politicians serving them change the subject from local economic failure to the cultural alienness of the distant blue city—J.D. Vance being the type specimen. You cannot understand the politics of the places that don’t matter until you understand who owns them.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Torsten Slok:

Share

Torsten Slok: Hyperscaler CDS Widening Is Not a Dealer Inventory Story <https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/hyperscaler-cds-widening-is-not-a-dealer-inventory-story>: ‘The widening in hyperscaler CDS is not driven by dealer hedging of new issuance. If it were, bank CDS would be widening too, given that banks remain the single largest source of IG supply, and instead bank spreads have sat flat near 40 bps. What the market is repricing is hyperscaler credit fundamentals, namely a debt-financed AI capex cycle with rising leverage, negative free cash flow and uncertain payback on depreciating assets:

…

Brad DeLong here: One thing that might be going on here: The usual default math assumes debtors want to pay. But founder-controlled firms with a “you lent us too much” attitude introduce a strategic-default option that standard systems of ratings do not fully capture. Several of these issuers have exactly the kind of principals who would treat a contractual obligation as a negotiating position. At the moment the spreads are only 0.6%-point, still small change, especially in the context of DataCenter builders who are looking forward either to extraordinary wealth or to the protection of their current flow of platform-monopoly profits. These spreads are not doing much to discourage the boom. But they do show that market opinion is nervous. And when market opinion is nervous, it might turn and collapse the boom at any moment.

The depreciation schedules on AI hardware are the potential jokers in the deck. If the useful life of an NVIDIA H100-vintage cluster turns out to really be three years rather than six, the capex cycle’s economics invert, and the leverage that looked prudent looks reckless.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Everyone’s watching Nvidia’s stock. But there is also honest signal in credit spreads — where the price of bearing lower-tail risk tells you exactly how nervous the smart or at least the willing-to-lend money is.

Share

The bond market contains people who don’t care much about the upper tail of the boom, but want to price the bust scenarios appropriately. It is thus an aggregator of what people willing to pay to bear lower-tail risk are in fact thinking about what that lower-tail bust risk is.

As I understand things, having the United States Post Office hobble mail-in voting would not “help” Republicans, at least not in the forthcoming election. Largely urban Democratic voters planning to vote by mail whose plans would be disrupted by the USPS’s throwing their ballots away are easier for the Democratic Party to reach and help than the Republican Party can find and help the largely rural and older Republican voters planning to vote by mail. And each voter disenfranchised weakens our democracy, and is bad for everyone, at least if you are not in the business of burn-it-all-down. (Which, I do understand, much of the Republican Party base these days really is.)

Share

Thus Trump and the Trumpists spending so much time on this advances one and only one of their goals: to falsely keep convincing their base that elections are illegitimate because the Democrats keep finding ways to cheat by counting the ballots of illegal immigrants. That is one of their core goals, yes: to undermine the legitimacy of Democrats by every means necessary. And we should not minimize that. But, still, it does seem to be a strategic choice that only a chaos-monkey would make.

Steve Vladeck is my go-to guy for these things. With respect to the Trumpists’ attempts to get the USPS to throw away valid mail-in ballots, he says:

• The six-justice (probably; we don’t really know for sure) solid majority wrote a cryptic order (a) denying the Trump administration’s ask for permission for the USPS to throw away ballots in this election, (b) signaling that the government is unlikely to win this case in the end, thus (c) putting a heavy thumb on the scale against the USPS rule for the lower courts who will now hear the case in full.

• That merits signal, more than the bare denial itself, is the ruling’s real content.

Give a gift subscription

He is, I think, right: this is not just a procedural but a merits judgment. The majority is telling lower courts that if they rule for Trump in this or other cases like this they will be reversed in the end. That is the biggest deal here. But I have to note that such cryptic signalling is a hell of a way to run a railroad, and shows what a despicable state of affairs we are in with respect to the center, not the crazypants right wing, of this corrupt Supreme Court.

Fifteen justices the next time the Democrats can would be very good.

• Vladeck says Kavanauh has a “novel” procedural reframing that “may open a new doctrinal door”, moving the frame from fuzzy equitable vibe-judging to easier to grasp procedural grounds.

Leave a comment

In my view, this is law-professor sanewashing here. Kavanaugh does not want to say that Trump is gonna lose, would have to if he were doctrinally consistent with himself, and so invents a new rule.

• Alito and Thomas really are crazypants: detached from reality and proud of it.

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

But let me delay that to the end: this is already too long for an introduction:

<https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/250-what-we-learned-from-usps-v-california> <https://www.stevevladeck.com>

Steve Vladeck

Sep 15, 2026

By now, you’ve probably seen the headlines—that the Supreme Court on Monday night denied the Trump administration’s application for a stay in U.S. Postal Service v. California, thereby leaving intact district court injunctions that will effectively prevent the federal government from implementing a new USPS rule respecting mail-in ballots in time for this November’s elections.

Without question, this is a very big decision (and a big loss for President Trump). It’s also not an especially surprising ruling, even for this Court. As my Georgetown colleague Marty Lederman documented in multiple blog posts, and as a really excellent amicus brief by Professors Rick Hasen, Ed Foley, Pam Karlan, and Doug Laycock demonstrated in detail, the government had (and made) both an exceptionally weak case on the merits and an even weaker case on the “equities” of emergency relief—even relative to other emergency applications that, in my view, should also have been denied. And although the Court wrote only three sentences (sigh), two of those sentences signaled the majority’s agreement on both of those points: “The Government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the District Court’s preliminary injunction. And the equitable factors applicable for obtaining emergency relief from this Court do not favor a stay.” Just to say it out loud, those are two independently fatal obstacles to relief.

But despite the (unfortunate) brevity of the Court’s order, I wanted to write a quick post about the decision because I think we still learned at least three important lessons from the nine pages the justices handed down last night—one about the majority; one about Justice Kavanaugh (who wrote a one-paragraph concurrence); and one about Justices Thomas and Alito (who filed an eight-page dissent penned by Alito).

A lot of media outlets reported the ruling as 7-2. As ever, I think that’s a mistake—not because it’s necessarily wrong, but because it isn’t necessarily right. It seems to me that we only know three things for a fact: First, Justices Thomas and Alito were publicly in dissent. Second, Justice Kavanaugh was publicly in the majority. And third, at least five other justices were also in the majority (because of the daylight between the majority’s cryptic sentence on the merits and what Justice Kavanaugh wrote in his concurrence, about which more shortly). Math being math, that leaves the possibility that a third justice voted for the stay internally, but chose not to make their views public—that it was 6-3, not 7-2. We won’t know (for a long time) if this happened, and it’s almost certainly a distinction without a meaningful difference in the interim. But as with so many things about the Court’s emergency docket, it’s important to distinguish between what we know and what we think.

To me, the more significant math point here is that there’s no way it was 5-4. And so despite Justice Kavanaugh’s (surprising) support for the USPS’s authority here, my own read of the cryptic order is that five other justices publicly signaled that they do not believe the government will ultimately succeed in challenging Judge Talwani’s injunction. If that was all the Court had written, it would be possible to interpret that as a point about the equities—that five justices believed the government would never be able to displace preliminary relief in this case (which, again, would make sense given the imbalance of the equities here, and would not necessarily be expressing a view on the validity of the USPS rule).

But given that the Court added a separate sentence about the equities, it sure seems to me that a majority of the Court wanted to signal something bigger—that the government isn’t going to win this case, because it’s unlikely five justices will ultimately vote to sustain the USPS rule even “on the merits.” If so, that’s a really important message not just to the Trump administration, but to lower courts. Unlike the Missouri redistricting dispute from last week, this case surely will go forward. And for better or worse (and my own view is the former), five justices other than Justice Kavanaugh have now put a pretty heavy thumb on the scale against the government on the merits.

Justice Kavanaugh, once again to his credit (I’ve been consistent about this), wrote separately to explain his position. Taking out his citations, here’s what he said:

In my view, based on the briefing the Court has received at this interim stage, there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority. But applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections. For that reason, I concur in the denial of the application for stay.

Again, there’s a lot going on in three short sentences. The first sentence sure reads like a response to the majority—that, unlike his five (or six) colleagues who also voted to deny the stay, he thinks the USPS may win on the ultimate merits of the validity of the rule. If this is a response to the majority, then I think it only reinforces the reading that the majority was suggesting exactly the opposite. For what it’s worth, I think he’s completely wrong on the merits. But the fact that he felt impelled to make that point is at least decent evidence that the majority thinks so, too.

The second sentence is what I find most striking. I would’ve thought that the fact that “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections” is an argument about the equities—that, even if the government is likely to ultimately prevail, the harms and chaos from rushing the rule into effect are reason enough to keep the rule paused through November. But Justice Kavanaugh frames it as a procedural APA violation instead. That matters in at least two respects.

First, Kavanaugh may be avoiding the equities because otherwise he’d have to explain why Purcell doesn’t push in exactly the opposite direction—since he has so often deployed that “principle” to keep federal courts from doing exactly what Judge Talwani did here, i.e., blocking an eleventh-hour legislative/executive change to voting rules. Second, and Purcell aside, this approach seems to open the door to other challenges to late-breaking federal changes to election procedures on procedural APA grounds—where the argument is that the change is procedurally unlawful because it is so late in the game. At least off the cuff, that seems like an interesting way to convert the malleability of equities balancing in election cases into more objective procedural harms, at least when the federal government is the defendant. But smarter folks than me will need to think about how that can and would work in practice.

And then there’s the dissent.

I have been quite critical before of many of Justice Alito’s separate opinions on the emergency docket. He has a tendency to take liberties with the facts (or procedural posture); to make brazen claims without substantiation; and to insinuate unclean hands on the part of lower courts, litigants, and/or his colleagues in the majority without doing the work of proving it. Well, all of those tendencies were on display in these eight pages, along with a rather stunning disregard for the interests of eligible voters in having their lawfully cast votes counted. Indeed, to the concern that the rule would disenfranchise millions of voters, Alito’s only response was that “I take that problem very seriously, but it is not enough to convince me to deny the application.”

Why not? Alito offered two reasons, and they’re both remarkably tendentious.

First, Alito wrote that “the States disagree about the nature of these effects. Twelve States supported the rule below and asserted that compliance at this time is practicable.” As Professor Derek Muller explains in a lengthy post over at Election Law Blog, this is (1) a remarkable tense-change to muddy what twelve red states actually argued below; and (2) a non-sequitur given that the ability to comply with the rule is radically different from whether that compliance will lead to massive disenfranchisement of eligible voters.

Second, and worse, Alito wrote that “the plaintiff States and the courts bear a substantial share of the blame for the rule’s timing.” As the Brits would say, this is utter bollocks. Alito tried to spin the plaintiffs’ litigation behavior and the district court’s rulings as preventing the government from moving forward in putting out the USPS rule, but that’s just not a fair summary of the record. As Rick Hasen pointed out last night, “the district court allowed USPS to keep working on its rule and its (still nonexistent) portal for voluntary use by states.” Indeed, the fact that the USPS issued the rule the Supreme Court refused to unblock last night while the executive order was still enjoined should be all of the proof anyone needs that Alito is wrong to insinuate otherwise, to say nothing of the government’s inability to get the critical electronic portal online before voters started … voting. (For all of the ugly shots folks on the right have taken at Judge Talwani, the denial of a stay is a pretty significant vindication of her rulings in these cases.)

Alito also blamed his colleagues, noting that “this Court spent from late July to the end of August drafting nearly 40 pages of opinions, including two dissents, despite the Government’s public notice that it would not publish a final rule while subject to the injunctions, and its representation that it had a strong interest in issuing its rule in early- to mid-August to allow time to implement it.” As Alito concluded (read this sentence carefully), “The plaintiff States cannot claim the timing of the rule tilts the equities in their favor when they, and courts hearing their claims, are responsible for so much of the delay.”

Of course, it is ludicrous to blame plaintiffs for delays Alito attributes to courts. It’s even more ludicrous to do so when the Supreme Court’s own prior ruling in this case (which Alito almost certainly joined) asserted that the earlier injunctions had to be stayed because the plaintiffs’ suits were filed too early. And it’s tendentious to the extreme to claim that the point that putatively “tilts the equities in [plaintiffs’] favor” is the timing of the USPS rule, not the massive disenfranchisement that neither the government nor Alito ever publicly disputed would occur were it to go into effect. It may not surprise anyone that this is where Alito and Thomas are. But it’s striking to see it captured in writing so plainly and unmistakably.

***

In the end, it’s heartening that only two justices were willing to say these things out loud. And it’s even more heartening that a majority of the Court was unwilling to abide President Trump’s transparent effort to make it harder for a large number of lawfully registered voters to actually cast their ballots in the 2026 general election. But it continues to be deeply sobering that it came to all of this in the first place.

Happy Tuesday, all.

<https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/250-what-we-learned-from-usps-v-california> <https://www.stevevladeck.com>

Brad DeLong here: The important thing is, I think, just how crazypants cynical corrupt liars Alito and Thomas are: they lie, and lie about lying, and lie about lying about lying. And are confident no one and nothing can ever touch them. Vladeck, again, has law-professor understatement here:

I have been quite critical before of many of Justice Alito’s separate opinions on the emergency docket. He has a tendency to take liberties with the facts (or procedural posture) [that is, TELL LIES]; to make brazen claims without substantiation [that is, TELL LIES]; and to insinuate unclean hands on the part of lower courts, litigants, and/or his colleagues in the majority without doing the work of proving it [that is, TELL LIES].

Well, all of those tendencies were on display in these eight pages, along with a rather stunning disregard for the interests of eligible voters in having their lawfully cast votes counted…. To the concern that the rule would disenfranchise millions of voters, Alito’s only response was that “I take that problem very seriously, but it is not enough to convince me to deny the application.” Why not? Alito offered two reasons, and they’re both remarkably tendentious [that is, HE TELLS MORE LIES]….

Alito[’s claim]… “twelve States… asserted that compliance at this time is practicable”… [is] a remarkable tense-change [that is, HE TELLS MORE LIES] to muddy what twelve red states actually argued… and… a non-sequitur… [because] comply[ing] with the rule is radically different from whether that compliance will lead to massive disenfranchisement….

Second, and worse, Alito wrote that “the plaintiff States and the courts bear a substantial share of the blame for the rule’s timing.” As the Brits would say, this is utter bollocks [that is, HE TELLS MORE LIES]…. Alito also blamed his colleagues…. [And] Alito concluded (read this sentence carefully), “The plaintiff States cannot claim the timing of the rule tilts the equities in their favor when they, and courts hearing their claims, are responsible for so much of the delay.”

Of course, it is ludicrous to blame plaintiffs for delays Alito attributes to courts. It’s even more ludicrous to do so when the Supreme Court’s own prior ruling in this case (which Alito almost certainly joined) asserted that… the plaintiffs’ suits were filed too early. And it’s tendentious to the extreme to claim that the point that putatively “tilts the equities in [plaintiffs’] favor” is the timing of the USPS rule, not the massive disenfranchisement that neither the government nor Alito ever publicly disputed would occur….

It may not surprise anyone that this is where Alito and Thomas are. But it’s striking to see it captured in writing so plainly and unmistakably. In the end, it’s heartening that only two justices were willing to say these things out loud…

No. It is not at all heartening that there are two justices willing to say these things out loud. Not at all heartening. And that Roberts has not lifted a finger to rein in Alito and Thomas tells us a lot about who he is as well.

Fifteen justices would be good. And if that leads to a partisan race whereby in two decades we have 150 justices? That has been baked in the cake since the Democratic majorities of 2009 refused to impose sanctions on the Supreme Court for its lawless Bush v. Gore decision, and it is delaying those sanctions that has emboldened the Roberts Court to become so corrupt and lawless.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment