Remember, according to Wikipedia, Benford's law applies to election data in every country except the United States, where the laws of statistics are totally different.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
For elections, the test should be with the second digit, not the first.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law
> Benford's law has also been misapplied to claim election fraud. When applying the law to Joe Biden's election returns for Chicago, Milwaukee, and other localities in the 2020 United States presidential election, the distribution of the first digit did not follow Benford's law. The misapplication was a result of looking at data that was tightly bound in range, which violates the assumption inherent in Benford's law that the range of the data be large. The first digit test was applied to precinct-level data, but because precincts rarely receive more than a few thousand votes or fewer than several dozen, Benford's law cannot be expected to apply. According to Mebane, "It is widely understood that the first digits of precinct vote counts are not useful for trying to diagnose election frauds."
The other examples on this page used the second digit for their election analysis.
Matt Parker did a good video with lots of visuals to explain why Benford's Law works in general, but why it cannot always be simply applied to election results.
> In a working paper published on 10 November, Mebane looks deeper at the US election data using a 2BL test, based on the second digits and Benford’s law digit probabilities, along with other statistical tools.
> The bottom line: there are no signs of irregularity in the officially declared precinct vote counts data from Fulton County, GA, Allegheny County, PA, Milwaukee, WI, and Chicago, IL, as some have claimed.
> The vote counts from the four jurisdictions are not final, so one should treat them cautiously. Nonetheless preliminary analysis shows little that suggests there are problems.
Presumably a more up to date source exists now that the votes are finalized. The paper also has a link to the data they used on GitHub if you'd like to see for yourself (and both this & the paper below say they downloaded it from the Secretary of State websites of each state, so presumably you could do that too if you didn't trust this random GitHub).
This paper from MITRE is interesting but doesn't use 2BL. (They don't find any evidence of fraud. They do discuss 2BL in an appendix.)
I remember from an election fraud class in college that the best digits to check on vote counts (particularly in places like Russia) are actually the trailing digits, which should be uniformly distributed. Apparently eastern European fraudsters at this point are sophisticated enough (and have enough leeway to fudge the vote counts) that they can get past checks based on Benford's law, but they are usually too lazy to whiten the trailing digits of their fake numbers.
I was curious about 2020 after the pop science emerged and checked all of these precincts' trailing digits (as well as a few other statistics), and they looked totally fine.
The M1 money supply increased by ~600% in the last five years, due to no-reserve banking and enormous money printing during covid, and people still act shocked when there's inflation. It's not because of wage growth, it's not because of "late stage capitalism", it's because of basic supply and demand. Nobody wants to address the elephant in the room that all of this is due to the botched response during covid.
I could've lived with the COVID printing if the Fed was more careful. There were inflation indications in early 2021 but the Fed used completely nonsense theory of "transitory inflation" which was obviously a lie to nearly every single economist but it somehow went on with it for a whole year.
After the biggest money supply growth in recent history the Fed somehow forgot basic economic concepts and its mandate for a full year. This is simply unbelievable. QE printing was still going on - in massive amounts - while inflation is showing up and the Fed is speaking nonsense about transitory inflation.
This game is rigged. The Fed is malicious, unpredictable and intentionally lying. It doesn't feel like the Fed is doing the best decision, it feels like the Fed is making intentionally unpredictable and even irrational decisions so that insiders, most likely big banks, could get to unravel their investment positions at the expense of the whole economy.
Ok, basic supply and demand says the more supply you have of something the cheaper it should get.
And yet, despite the 600% increase in supply of dollars, the dollar is stronger than ever.
Whether the money supply is responsible for the inflation or not, this is not basic supply and demand. It’s the exact opposite of basic supply and demand.
I think you may have linked to the wrong graph — while that graph does have a spike on it, the spike happens when the index was broadened in May 2020 to include savings and money market accounts.
Mythic shut down recently. Well, technically they still exist on paper, but they're a shell of the former selves. It's a shame, really. Their technology is (was) amazing.
There's a little over $200 billion dollars left in the US treasury right now, we have higher debt-to-GDP than Greece did at the beginning of their sovereign debt crisis, AND we have persistent high inflation. Something has to give. You can't fight inflation and pursue monetary easing at the same time.
Fed can just print another 20 trillions. Treasury can mint a special 10T USD coin to payback FED. Nothing needs to give. As long as people have "faith" in USD, the music will continue...but those damn Yuan and Rubbles. Taht we need ro launch another Iraq war with China and Russia. They have WMD that we can blame on and get our boys there with poker cards - a version for the Russian and a version for the Chinese. Surely we can beat them as easily as Iraqis? Ignore Afghan - we always intended to replace Talebans with Talebans while we wash 10T USD for congress money laundry.
You're proposing to print away the debt during a period of already high inflation. While you're technically correct that we can avoid default by printing more money, the practical consequences of monetizing the national debt right now, would be catastrophic hyperinflation.
> You’re proposing to print away the debt during a period of already high inflation.
Current inflation isn’t that high (YoY is still high because its trailing), and if there is a recession, it will naturally fall faster, and easy money is the natural policy in those conditions, independent of debt concerns (which monetary policy generally is, that’s kind of the point of an independent central bank.)
Greece's debt-to-GDP ratio never stopped climbing; it peaked at over 200% in 2020. The crisis, meanwhile, was short-lived as the ratio per se was not among the most salient factors.
Greece crisis is short-lived? Greece never recovered from the crisis.
Employment in Greece in 2010: 4.6 million.
Employment in Greece now: around 4.0 million.
Sure the unemployment rate has gone "down". That's because the youth gave up and simply moved from Greece. The GDP per capita will improve because of that but their GDP in constant prices never recovered (and is around 2002-2004 levels).
The crisis itself pertained to bond defaults, and in particular the reverberations through the international financial system. But the extra context you've provided only drives home my point: facial nominal figure comparisons are worthless.
Geece had to massively increase taxes and implement austerity programs, to say nothing of the EU bailout. Since then, they've been able to survive on low interest rates. Low interest rates which are now gone, as the world is busy fighting inflation.
Inflation cuts both ways, eviscerating older debt. That's the whole reason for the present banking crisis. In any event, the debt-to-GDP ratio being higher than Greece's at the time of its debt crisis says absolutely nothing by itself about the U.S. situation. Pointing it out is a baseless, cheap insinuation.
Except it's not, because our interest rates are also in the same range as when their debt crisis began. Greece was fine at those debt levels until their bond yields hit 5%, at which point they entered into a self-reinforcing spiral of insolvency. The Federal Reserve is currently targeting interest rates above 5% to fight inflation.
