Month: February 2021

A quick reminder. You've probably been hearing a lot about whether Democrats can eliminate the filibuster. Or what can be passed via reconciliation. Or the Byrd Rule. Or whether the Senate parliamentarian's rulings can be overturned by Kamala Harris in her role as president of the Senate.

If you're interested in the details of all these things, fine. If you're not, they all boil down to the same thing: Do Democrats have 50 votes to do what they want to do? That's it. It takes 50 votes (plus Harris) to kill the filibuster. It takes 50 votes to pass even a reconciliation bill. If Harris overrules the parliamentarian on a substantive point, you're left with a bill that still needs 50 votes. And there are exactly 50 Democrats in the Senate. If they lose even a single vote they can't pass anything—and there are at least a couple of Democrats who won't vote for a bill that undermines the parliamentarian.

This means that Democrats don't have 50 votes to kill the filibuster. They also don't have 50 votes to pass a stimulus bill under reconciliation rules unless they satisfy every single member of their caucus. Every. Single. Member.

This explains everything. Forget the details. Democrats need 60 votes for most things, but even for the few exceptions they still need 50 votes and they don't always have them. End of story.

UPDATE: I originally wrote that it takes 50 votes to overrule the parliamentarian. In practice, it takes only 40 votes. The text has been corrected.

How many working mothers have dropped out of the labor force due to the challenges of watching children who are at home during the pandemic? This is not an easy question to answer, but I want to take a rough stab at it.

First off, here are the basic numbers. Between January of 2020 and January of 2021, about 5.6 million people dropped out of the labor force. Of that, however, 2.1 million are 65 or older and are retiring, not giving up on the job market. They are also irrelevant to any analysis of working parents. So that leaves us with 3.5 million working-age people who have dropped out of the labor force.

Of that, 2 million are women and 1.5 million are men. Here's how it breaks down by age:

This chart shows that women of childbearing age are dropping out at greater rates than men, while older women are dropping out at lower rates than men. The obvious interpretation is that the excess dropout rate in the 20-44 age range (i.e., the excess of women over men) is likely due to the pressures of raising kids who are suddenly at home 24/7.

That excess comes to 700,000. This is a rough estimate, but as far as I know there's no reliable survey data that directly asks women why they've dropped out of the labor force. Still, it's probably not too far off the mark, especially since the difference in dropout rate by age is so stark.

This is about 1% of all working women. You may decide for yourself if this is a lot or a little.

I'm not pretending this is the biggest deal in the world, but . . .

If you read the story, it's about what the headline leads you to expect. This stretch of road has been the scene of decades of nonstop accidents (13 in the past year alone), but pleas to do something about it have been pretty much met with "meh." However, now that someone famous has been injured there, there's a sudden outpouring of support for doing something about it:

The accident generated international headlines and has prompted officials to take a new look at how to improve safety....Sheriff Alex Villanueva says he will speak with city officials about possible solutions.

County Supervisor Janice Hahn, who represents the area, plans to request a safety review of the stretch of road where the accident occurred. “I have driven this road myself many times, and I have noticed how easy it is to pick up speed on that hill, but I did not realize how many accidents were happening there,” Hahn said in an email.

This is a minor example of something that's all too common. Why do we so often have to wait until some famous person has a problem before we can summon up the will to do something about it? Or, alternatively, until some member of Congress personally faces some kind of hardship and suddenly decides we really ought to fix it? Why not just fix our problems, big or small, regardless of who they affect?

While I was waiting to take pictures of the Pirate Tower a few weeks ago, I diddled around taking some other pictures too. In particular, while the sun was still up, I set a high shutter speed and took some pictures of the surf crashing against the rocks. My camera didn't appreciate this, but it did produce a few interesting images.

I received this email after writing about the high cost of deregulated power in Texas yesterday, and thought I'd pass it along without comment. Here it is:

I've worked in utilities on the regulated side of the fence for over two decades now. I have never seen a retail provider that provides a better price than the local distribution utility. Never. It is a massive rip-off of epic proportions and they prey mainly on the poor.

These retail providers also have massive clout in state legislatures and utility boards and work hard to get regulations passed which benefit them even more. Regulated utilities then have to incorporate these regulations into their systems which increases their complexity and overhead. Those costs get passed on to the regulated utility's customers. It's not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but not only do retail energy providers screw over their own customers, they also screw over the regulated utility's customers too!

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 24. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Steve Benen passes along the news that Republicans are starting to offer up deals for raising the minimum wage. Senators Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton, for example, say they'd support a minimum wage hike to $10 per hour in return for Democrats supporting a federal requirement that all businesses use the E-Verify system to prevent the hiring of undocumented workers. But Steve doesn't think this offer has much of a chance:

This isn't likely to go anywhere. For one thing, a phased-in increase to $10 per hour is clearly short of Democratic goals....What's more, while Democrats have voiced broad skepticism about the use of E-verify, they're open to the possibility of expanding its use, but only as part of a comprehensive immigration reform package.

I wouldn't accept this offer as is. I'd like to see the minimum wage rise to $12 or so, which would put it at 50% of the median wage. And although I'm a fan of E-Verify, it needs to have some safeguards built around it, along with adequate funding to keep it working properly.

But if those turned out to be negotiable items, I'd be all in favor. Not only would it get the minimum wage up to a decent level, but it would start us down a road in which border security is aimed primarily at American employers, not immigrants themselves. This would be a huge improvement over the current dehumanizing approach.

In fact, if E-Verify were properly implemented, we could eventually shut down ICE and the Border Patrol altogether. If employers can be prevented from hiring undocumented workers, the flow of immigrants across the border will slow to a trickle with almost no effort at all. They come to the US for jobs, after all, and if there are no jobs they'll stop coming.

I have my doubts that Republicans are open to negotiating a decent version of the Romney/Cotton proposal, but you never know. It would be worth a try.

What's this? Some lonely palm trees on an uninhabited desert isle? Nope. It's some lonely palm trees at Sunset Beach in Southern California. A cluster of three palms has been planted at the end of each road that leads to the beach, and this is one of them.

Two decades ago Texas deregulated its power sector and required 60% of its residents to buy electricity from a retail power company. The other 40% stuck with traditional local utilities. The Wall Street Journal shows us the results:

According to the Journal, retail customers have paid $28 billion more for their power since 2004 than they would have paid at the rates charged to the customers of the state’s traditional utilities:

From 2004 through 2019, the annual rate for electricity from Texas’s traditional utilities was 8% lower, on average, than the nationwide average rate, while the rates of retail providers averaged 13% higher than the nationwide rate, according to the Journal’s analysis.

The Texas Coalition for Affordable Power, a group that buys electricity for local government use, produced similar findings in a study of the state’s power markets and concluded that high statewide prices relative to the national average “must be attributed to the deregulated sector of Texas.”

So what happens now? Probably nothing. In Texas, deregulation is something like a religion: it works by definition, even if it doesn't work. Just give it another 20 years and you'll see.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 23. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.