Richard Burr continues to be dogged by complaints about his irresponsible rhetoric on bank deposits, and his allies, such as Richard Danos, chairman of the Henderson County Republican Party, continue to dissemble about what he said:

The Times-News reported that as part of an economic talk to the County Chamber of Commerce, Burr told of urging his wife to withdraw some cash from their ATM during the banking crisis — a story he has repeated dozens of times. Many Americans took out some extra cash as a common sense precaution during that period.

Look. People withdraw cash from ATMs all the time. That would be a ridiculous anecdote to tell. Here’s what he actually said:

“On Friday night, I called my wife and I said, ‘Brooke, I am not coming home this weekend. I will call you on Monday. Tonight, I want you to go to the ATM machine, and I want you to draw out everything it will let you take,” Burr said, according to the Hendersonville Times-News. “And I want you to tomorrow, and I want you to go Sunday.’ I was convinced on Friday night that if you put a plastic card in an ATM machine the last thing you were going to get was cash.”

This is Burr, implying to his audience, that their bank deposits are not safe. In fact, bank deposits are insured by the FDIC. This is supposed to give people confidence that they need to have these kind of fears, and thus prevent bank runs. And with few bank runs, there’s little need for the FDIC to actually step in. When Burr implies that the deposits are not safe, he’s encouraging runs on banks. That won’t lead to anyone losing their deposits—whether or not Burr understands it, the deposits are insured—but it will lead to losses for taxpayers who need to pay out insurance claims, and it will lead to bank failures and job losses.

This isn’t a huge deal, in the scheme of things, but it was an irresponsible thing to say. Burr and his friends should just take responsibility and move on.

For those keeping score at home, unlike a modest tax increase on a tiny number of people, this really would be socialism:

The U.S. Treasury would own at least a 50 percent stake in General Motors under a plan the company released today to avoid bankruptcy. [...] Under the outlines announced yesterday, the federal government would take an equity stake of at least 50 percent, the United Auto Workers would take as much as 39 percent, the company’s bondholders would get 10 percent and the existing shareholders 1 percent.

I’m pretty queasy about this idea. Liquidating General Motors amidst a huge recession would be a disaster. But at the same time, a state-owned GM is going to be tricky. There are lots of non-GM car plants in the United States. And the public interest—in, for example, high-speed rail and walkable cities and mass transit and reduced climate emissions—by no means identical to the interests of a large automaker.

Read Jessica Valenti on media’s latest effort to get women to panic about their marriage prospects. Let me just say that the entire trend toward delayed marriage needs to be put in better context than this:

The average age of American men marrying for the first time is now 28. That’s up five full years since 1970 and the oldest average since the Census Bureau started keeping track. If men weren’t pulling women along with them on this upward swing, I wouldn’t be complaining. But women are now taking that first plunge into matrimony at an older age as well. The age gap between spouses is narrowing: Marrying men and women were separated by an average of more than four years in 1890 and about 2.5 years in 1960. Now that figure stands at less than two years. I used to think that only young men — and a minority at that — lamented marriage as the death of youth, freedom and their ability to do as they pleased. Now this idea is attracting women, too.

These trends are very real. But people ought to understand that there’s a huge amount of variation from time to time and place to place in this. It’s just a kind of knee-jerk prejudice to assume that conditions prevailing in 1960 in the United States are “normal” and that today’s situation is abnormal.

Here, for example, is a table from Hamano Kiyoshi’s “Marriage Patterns and the Demographic System of Late Tokugawa Japan”

In the sai system, a baby is born at age one and reaches age two a year later. In other words, in 19th century Shibuki the average age at first marriage for men was 29.5 years (higher than in the contemporary US) and for women was 23.7 (lower than in the contemporary US) and the gap was higher than the Census Bureau has ever recorded for the US. In Wrighton & Levine’s Poverty and Piety in an English Village they write “The relative precocity of marriage in Terling becomes more evident when it is compared with another village—Shepshed, Leceicerstershire. In that midland community during the 17th century, the mean age at first marriage was 29.4 for men and 28.1 for their brides.”

Nowadays, the average age at first marriage for women is substantially higher in Scandinavia, Spain, and France than in the United States.

Social customs vary, in other words, and they’ve always varied over time and from place to place. People have a large bias toward the status quo, so if customs today are different from customs a generation ago that seems alarming. But “traditional” age at first marriage only arose in the west in the 19th century. For about two hundred years before that, it was falling, and the current situation in the United States resembles what Gregory Clark describes in 17th century England.