Cats, charts, and politics
Spring is sproinging, and our front yard garden is starting to bloom. This gave me a chance to indulge in my new obsession of panoramic photography, since our garden is so close to the wall that a single shot can't capture more than half of it. This picture, believe it or not, is made up of ten separate shots.
Last year the Trump administration quietly shifted some funding meant for hospitals to fund vaccine development under Operation Warp Speed. Alex Tabarrok says there's nothing wrong with this:
The real scandal is why Congress never put big funding behind Operation Warp Speed—thus requiring the administration to fund OWS by surreptitiously cutting elsewhere.
But Congress made loads of funding available to OWS. Here's a recent Congressional Research Service report:
In the FY2020 laws, not much was appropriated specifically for COVID-19 vaccine-related efforts; instead, several accounts have funding available for relevant activities.
....In two of the four FY2020 coronavirus supplemental appropriations acts (P.L. 116-123 and P.L. 116-136), funding was made available for vaccine-related efforts to accounts at NIH, DOD, and the Public Health and Social Services Emergency Fund (PHSSEF)....In particular, up to roughly $30 billion (accounting for set-asides and transfers) in the PHSSEF account is available for vaccine development, manufacturing, and purchase until September 30, 2024.
This was all part of two bills passed in March of 2020, two months before Trump announced OWS. Was it enough? So far less than $20 billion has been spent, so I'd guess that it was. OWS has been a pretty good program, primarily aimed at guaranteeing purchases of vaccines as a way of reducing risk for vaccine developers, and it sure seems to have worked. Both Congress and the Trump administration seem like they handled it pretty well.
The Obama administration was no slouch when it came to siccing the Justice Department on suspected leakers, but the Trump administration put them to shame. Via the Intercept, here are the annual numbers for leak investigations referred to the Justice Department since 2009. Trump averaged 84 per year compared to 40 per year for Obama.
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 2. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
When I was at the zoo last year the sky was mostly overcast. However, the sun came out for a bit in the afternoon and produced this very contrasty picture of a male exclamatory paradise whydah. He has sort of a peacock style tail, apparently grown to absurd lengths in an arms race to attract the attention of the female whydah. But he can still fly!
The global number of new coronavirus cases rose for the first time in nearly two months, the World Health Organization said Monday....Cases over the past week jumped in every region except for Africa and the Western Pacific, the U.N. agency said.
Naturally this got me curious:
Sure enough, if you look at the period from February 22-28, daily cases worldwide have gone up by about 14,000. That's an increase of just over 3%. Not the biggest change, but definitely a move in the wrong direction.
So keep masking up and staying at home as much as possible, folks. We aren't out of the woods yet.
The Republican Party has won a majority of the white vote ever since the 1976 election. But how has this changed over the years?
This is a little tricky to measure. Obviously if Republicans win in a landslide, they're also going to win the white vote in a landslide. If they lose, their share of the white vote will go down. The only good way to measure this, then, is to look at the GOP's two-party share of the white vote compared to its two-party share of the total vote. Here it is:
In 1976, for example, Republicans won 48.9% of the total vote and 52.0% of the white vote, so the excess white vote was 3.1 percentage points. In 2020, Donald Trump won 47.7% of the total vote and 58.6% of the white vote, for an excess white vote of 10.9 percentage points.
The interesting thing to note is that the high point for the Republican Party was Mitt Romney in 2012. Running against a Black man they won an excess of 12.2 percentage points of the white vote. Donald Trump, running against the memory of a Black man, performed a bit worse in 2016, and worse still in 2020. This suggests that the white backlash against Barack Obama was at its peak when Obama was actually in the White House, and has declined a bit ever since.
The estate of Dr. Seuss has decided to remove six of his books from publication because of racist imagery. Philip Bump comments on a gift of Seuss books that his son received a few months ago:
One of the books he was sent was Dr. Seuss's “If I Ran the Zoo,” a book I had as a kid and that I remembered fondly. In it, a young boy imagines what he'd do with the local zoo were he in charge. It's Seuss, so the boy's conjurings are wild, weird creatures whose names rhyme with their points of origin.
I sat down to read it with Thomas and rambled along in rhythm. Then I turned the page to the “African island of Yerka” on which lived the Tufted Mazurka. In Seuss’s drawing, the bird-thing is perched on a pole being held by two caricatures of African men that are so obviously and immediately racist that it was almost breathtaking. It would be like watching an interview with Tom Hanks in which he suddenly started casually dropping racial slurs, a grotesque act accentuated by astonishment at the source. This was Dr. Seuss, the benchmark for authors of children’s books! And here are the racist caricatures he drew.
This is unsurprising given that the book was written in 1950, when this kind of imagery was unexceptional. But times change and no one wants their young kids reading and seeing this kind of stuff anymore. Naturally conservatives will yell about Seuss being "canceled" due to precious liberal sensitivities, but who cares? The Seuss estate is doing what's right, and there are loads of other Dr. Seuss books still available.
But here's what I don't get. Why not just remove this page from the book? If I Ran the Zoo isn't a narrative, it's a series of disconnected drawings. Removing one would do it no harm.
Or, for that matter, why not get someone to redraw the African pole bearers? It would be a pretty minor tweak.
If we were talking about Tolstoy or Faulkner, nobody would dare suggest such a thing. But this is Dr. Seuss. Creative integrity is just not that big a deal in a book of cartoons aimed at five-year-olds. Is it?
But I suppose the estate considered all these possibilities and decided against them. It's not as if this depletes the world of children's books, but it's still too bad. If I Ran the Zoo was a pretty good book. Not as good as On Beyond Zebra, maybe, but still pretty good.
For God's sake, people, don't let up now. We have a chance to get everyone vaccinated at the same time that COVID-19 cases are declining, and this is a golden opportunity that will happen only once. Let's not mess it up by opening up and ditching our masks too early. Another couple of months is all we need.
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 1. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
Over at the New Republic, Clio Chang tells the story of Richard Ault, a Silicon Valley technologist who fell on hard times and ended up in debt to the tune of $60,000:
“It’s ridiculous to me to think that $1,000 to every family in this country is going to save the country,” Ault said of the government’s sporadic relief checks, especially living in a city with such a high cost of living. “It’s rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
Ault is one of millions in the United States facing a similar crisis. Household debt, which has been on the rise for the last decade, reached an astronomical $14.56 trillion at the end of last year. As rent and mortgage debt piles up, nearly a third of people in the country are at risk of eviction or foreclosure. While credit card debt, which is now at $820 billion, fell overall, in part due to a decline in spending, some 51 million people still saw it increase during the pandemic. Student loan debt, the second-biggest type of household debt after mortgages, continues to skyrocket, reaching nearly $1.6 trillion.
This is an example of a writer who's just not willing to give up a standard narrative regardless of the facts. First off, here are blue-collar hourly earnings:
Hourly wages for blue-collar workers have been steadily rising since 2014 and spiked upward at the start of the pandemic recession. Even now, after wages lost a bit of their gain, they are still well above the trendline of the past few years.
Here is household debt:
Monthly debt service, which has been at its lowest recorded level for the past eight years, plunged yet again at the beginning of the pandemic recession. It is now well below anything seen since the Reagan era.
Here is the personal saving rate:
This is higher than anything we've seen since the Reagan era. Those "sporadic relief checks" have not only kept spending from falling off a cliff, they've also kept savings high. And this chart goes only through the third quarter of 2020, so it doesn't account for either the December stimulus bill or the current bill working its way through Congress.
Finally, here's the personal bankruptcy rate:
This is post-bankruptcy reform, so the comparison is apples to apples. Bankruptcies fell steadily during the Obama recovery, flattened out around 2016, and then spiked downward after the first stimulus bill passed in March of last year.
In summary: Nearly a year into the pandemic, American households have higher incomes, less debt, more savings, and are filing fewer bankruptcies than they have in decades.
I get that data doesn't tell you everything. Averages can hide a lot of variation, and there are always people in trouble even during the best of times. That said, the data doesn't even remotely back up the economic horror story that liberals seem to be addicted to. If anything, American workers are, in general, better off now than they have been in quite a while—and they'll be better off still after the American Rescue Plan is passed. So let's quit jawing and get it passed.