Here are two different takes on the abandoned gas station in Halloran Springs that’s a familiar sight to anyone traveling on Interstate 15 near the border with Nevada. This pair of photos drove home how much more difficult black-and-white is compared to color. With color photographs, there aren’t a lot of choices to be made in Photoshop. You can fiddle a bit with exposure and saturation and so forth, but just a little bit. Basically, the picture is what it is.

But black-and-white, especially in the Photoshop era, offers a huge choice of looks. In this one, I chose a very high contrast conversion, as if I’d been using a deep red filter, but if I’d chosen one of the other conversions it would have looked very different. Plus there’s generally more flexibility in “dodging” and “burning” of specific bits of the photograph. In this one, my recollection is that I applied even more contrast specifically to the Lo-Gas sign.

Were these the right choices? Another photographer might have chosen completely differently and produced a picture that was just as good or better. That’s all part of the fun.

NPR’s Jim Zarroli reports something about the March stimulus bill that I didn’t know:

Tucked into the bill are a series of provisions that mostly cut taxes for rich people. For example, they can now reduce their tax bills by claiming bigger losses from previous years, even though the losses they suffered had nothing to do with COVID-19. The Joint Committee on Taxation says that provision alone will provide an average tax cut of $1.6 million for people in the top income bracket. That includes a lot of people in the real estate business, like the Trump family.

Hmmm. Here’s the JCT estimates of the benefits from various tax loss changes:

That adds up to a tidy sum, and needless to say, we non-rich people don’t really benefit much from more generous tax loss carryforward rules. I don’t, anyway. For rich people, however, it’s quite the nice little boon, and it’s hard to believe they really needed it.

This is from a press release sent out by Americans for Tax Fairness:

America’s billionaires saw their wealth increase by 20%, or $584 billion, roughly since the beginning of the pandemic…according to a new report by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies – Program on Inequality (IPS)…..Overall, between March 18—the rough start date of the pandemic shutdown, when most federal and state economic restrictions were in place—and June 17, the total net worth of the 640-plus U.S. billionaires jumped from $2.948 trillion to $3.531 trillion, based on the two groups’ analysis of Forbes data.

This is perfectly plausible. Much of the wealth of billionaires is tied up in the stock market, which has soared by about 30 percent since March 18. In fact, you could make a case that billionaires as a class have invested pretty poorly during the pandemic if they can’t even keep up with an S&P 500 index fund.

Still, 20 percent is a healthy gain in only three months. But here’s the interesting thing: the rest of us have actually done better. I know this is a little hard to believe, so let me show you a couple of charts. First off, here’s disposable income:

This is an 8 percent jump, mostly due to the stimulus checks and the increased UI benefits. However, this is income, not net worth. I’m only showing it to you to demonstrate the plausibility of what comes next. Here is personal savings:

That’s a 100 percent increase. And measures of savings deposits, which are not much used by billionaires, are up by over $1 trillion. This suggests that the $2 trillion increase in personal savings is mostly due to the increased wealth of non-rich people. Putting those two things together, my guess is that the actual increase is in the neighborhood of 50-90 percent. It’s impossible to say exactly how much this increases the overall net worth of the non-rich, but probably a fair amount.

I’m limited in what I can show you because many of the most interesting measures are collected only quarterly and aren’t available yet. But I think these two measures do a decent job of showing the overall shape of things.

So what’s my point? A couple of things:

• Obviously billionaires have had a much easier time handling the pandemic compared to the rest of us. There’s no argument about that. They’re rich; they can’t get fired; and they can even afford to hop over to some Caribbean island and avoid the pandemic entirely.
• At the same time, trying to measure income and wealth over very small time periods during a huge economic upheaval is a mug’s game. In the case of billionaires, their increase in wealth is mostly tied to stocks, which might crash at any moment. In the case of working folks, their increase is due to government benefits that they’re chewing through quickly and which might or might not get renewed. In both cases, in other words, the increase in income and net worth is something of a mirage.

Beyond that, I don’t have any big point to make. I’d certainly rather be a billionaire than a working stiff, even if their 20 percent increase is technically less than the 50-90 percent increase among the rest of us. That 20 percent represents a whole lot more money and is almost certainly more durable than artificial increases from government programs.

Still, those government programs have worked. They need to be renewed ASAP.

Here’s some cheery news to start the day:

The dreaded ‘alligator mouth’ continues to open. pic.twitter.com/EFSDXNYR16

— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) July 7, 2020

This helps to restore my faith in the American public a little bit.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through July 6. I’ve mentioned the divergence between cases and deaths in the United States before, but it’s gotten to the point where it really needs more than the handwaving that it usually gets on TV and in newspapers. When cases were going up back in April, we were told that deaths followed by 2-3 weeks. But our second wave of new cases is over a month old at this point and so far it’s had no effect on mortality at all. The death rate just keeps on dropping.

Maybe there’s an explanation for this. Maybe next week the death rate will finally start to rise. But we keep saying that, and next week never comes. Are there any epidemiologists out there who are really working to come to grips with this?

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

Icon Sportswire/Icon SMI via ZUMA

As near as I can tell, the most common reaction from most high-profile, movement conservatives to the toppling of Confederate statues is . . . sarcasm. Hey, how about toppling statues of Margaret Sanger? Burn! Why aren’t we toppling statues of Marx and Engels? Burn! How about the Hollywood Walk of Fame? Burn! And your hero Lincoln was just a big ol’ racist too. Why aren’t we toppling statues of him? Burn!

Is there something in the water that prevents so many conservatives with big media platforms from taking this seriously? There is, obviously, a perfectly good case for tearing down Confederate statues but leaving nearly everything else alone.¹ I should know, since it’s pretty much my position. After all, it’s one thing to have been racist in the past, when explicit racism was all but universal, and quite another to literally fight a war of secession in defense of Black slavery.

There’s nothing non-conservative about this stance—unless you’re afraid of offending a big chunk of your white Southern readers, of course. Or if laying sick burns on liberals is more important than seriously discussing whether or not statues of Confederate soldiers have any place in modern American life. So how about killing the sarcasm and taking a serious position on this?

And since I’m taking conservatives to task for this, I should also point to this piece by Jim Geraghty about the renaming of military bases. He makes a sensible argument about the best way to go about it.

¹“Nearly” because movements to de-statue racist colonizers like Columbus and Junipero Serra are of very long standing.

I went for a drive after dinner on July 4. I had some ideas in mind for pictures, but none of them really panned out. However, I did end up with a bunch of photos taken from inside my car, so here’s what July 4 looked like while driving around aimlessly in Southern California.

First up is a lovely sunset. This is on the San Diego Freeway near South Coast Plaza:

After that I tooled into Long Beach, where I stopped for gas. By chance, the moon was just coming up:

Then I drove around with amateur fireworks going off all around me for the next hour. Here’s a sample:

This is fucking nuts:

The man Trump appointed to the most sensitive national security position in US government and a current martyr/hero of the Trumpist right just posted a video of himself taking the QAnon oath. https://t.co/w5dyHCUEwz

— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) July 5, 2020

Apparently Flynn’s descent into madness, which started around 2014, is now complete. Thank God he’s nowhere near the levers of power at this point.

BTW, I’m planning to start KAnon, a competitor to QAnon. To join, you’ll have to take an oath to deconstruct all my blog posts to find the secret messages I’ve been embedding into them for the past 20 years. After you’ve decoded all 20,000 of them, all you have to do is arrange them in the proper order and they will tell you what to do. Once you do this, you will be promoted to KAnon corporal, the first step on your way to KAnon field marshal. So get cracking.

The Supreme Court says that states can require electors to vote for the presidential candidate they’re supposed to vote for:

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that states may require presidential electors to support the winner of the popular vote and punish or replace those who don’t, settling a disputed issue in advance of this fall’s election.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the court, and settled the disputed “faithless elector” issue before it affected the coming presidential contest. The Washington state law at issue “reflects a tradition more than two centuries old,” she wrote. “In that practice, electors are not free agents; they are to vote for the candidate whom the state’s voters have chosen.”

This has two consequences. First, states can join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and make it stick. Under the terms of the NPVIC, electors are required to vote for the winner of the popular vote, but only if states with a majority of electors have joined the compact. Today’s ruling makes this legal and enforceable.

Second, it puts an end to “faithless” electors, who vote for Ron Paul or Colin Powell or whoever they think makes the cutest protest statement. In 2016, ten electors tried to cast faithless votes, and it’s time for this to stop. We live in an era where it’s common to blow up political norms, and this could easily have gotten out of hand. Far better to put a hammer on it now than later, when it might actually affect an election. All that’s left now is for states to follow up and write laws requiring electors to do what they’re supposed to do.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through July 5. Canada is showing a weird little bounce in deaths. Sweden hasn’t bothered to report anything for the past four days, once again redefining the whole concept of “weekend.” In the US, we’ve been plateaued at about 1.5 deaths per million for the past week.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.