Month: August 2021

The Congressional Budget Office has released its score of the bipartisan infrastructure bill:

Enacting Senate Amendment 2137...would decrease direct spending by $110 billion, increase revenues by $50 billion, and increase discretionary spending by $415 billion. On net, the legislation would add $256 billion to projected deficits over that period.

Conservatives are shocked that it turns out the bill won't pay for itself. Meh. I say the big news is that this so-called "$1.2 trillion bill" increases discretionary spending¹ by only $305 billion. Over ten years. That represents about a 1.5% increase in federal discretionary spending.²

And we spent six months haggling over this? Seriously? It's literally peanuts.

¹Which is only about a third of the total federal budget to begin with.

²There's also an additional $196 billion in "contract authority." However, that's relatively meaningless since it doesn't specify any actual spending, which is controlled by each year's appropriation bill.

Here are the durations of every US recession since World War II:

The pandemic recession of 2020 was only two months long. What accounts for its astounding brevity?

The most likely answer is Congress. According to the NBER recession dating folks, the recession started in February. Almost instantly Congress made it clear that it took the recession seriously by passing $2.4 trillion in rescue funding that included both immediate relief (checks) as well as longer term help (expanded UI benefits). By April the recession was over.

This has never happened before. There have been past stimulus bills, to be sure, but never of the speed and magnitude that we showed last year. Nothing even close.

So this is a fascinating macroeconomic experiment. Was there something special about the coronavirus recession? Or does our response show that we could have avoided past recessions by passing huge, immediate spending bills? Economists will be arguing about this for decades.

Pictures of Rome will decorate the blog for months to come, but for now let's get back home. This is a Western tiger swallowtail, which I recently discovered is not quite as colorful as an Eastern tiger swallowtail. Why is everything more colorful on the other side of the Mississippi?

The top picture shows the butterfly head on. The bottom picture is more conventional.

Stuck in the middle of a Recode piece about the chip shortage is this paragraph:

Chipmakers are already producing chips at their maximum capacity, according to Falan Yinug of the Semiconductor Industry Association, a trade and lobbying group that represents the chip industry. “Chip production has, in fact, increased substantially, and more chips have shipped in recent months than ever before,” Yinung told Recode.

Here's a paragraph from NikkeiAsia:

TSMC — a key supplier to nearly all major automotive chip developers, such as Infineon, NXP, Sony and Renesas Electronics — said it plans to increase output of microcontroller units (MCUs) by 60% this year. That represents a 30% increase over the 2019 pre-pandemic level, according to the company. MCUs are essential components for a range of car parts, from air-bag and motor controls to tire pressure monitors and lighting systems.

The old story of the chip shortage had to do with automakers and others cancelling orders during the pandemic, causing chipmakers to shut down production—which is hard to start back up. But recent stories are suggesting that the problem is more related to massive demand simply outstripping production capacity. Everyone is pumping out as many chips as they can but there aren't enough to go around. So what's the real story?

I'm not sure, but apparently the problem is centered mostly on chips using old 40 nm technology, which are sort of the 60-watt light bulbs of the industry. Production capacity for these chips is limited because nobody has been investing money in new fabs for a technology that seemed unlikely to grow. That's not a pandemic problem, it's just a garden variety capacity and forecasting problem.

So . . . I dunno. But the more I read about this the more it seems like it's mostly a coincidence that it happened during the pandemic. Overall, it's just your basic problem of an old technology that chipmakers thought would go away over time but has instead stuck around longer than they thought it would. This would have come to a head in 2020 under normal circumstance, but the pandemic put it off until 2021.

If anyone can point me to toward a reliable piece that dives into this more deeply, I'd be grateful.

What should we call people whose heritage is sort of Iberian-ish and who hail from South of the border? Gallup has the answer:

For now, anyway, most of the respondents really don't care what they're called. But the ones with opinions mostly prefer Hispanic, while the popularity of the uber-woke Latinx continues to be nonexistent.

But don't give up, my woke friends. Fifty years ago, Black folks mostly preferred negro, and the ones who didn't were split between colored and Black. So you might yet win the day. It will just take a while.

My post this morning about cash assistance prompted me to tot up just how much the federal government pays out each year in cash assistance to those with low incomes. Roughly speaking, here's the answer:

Most, but not all of this is in the form of refundable tax credits, which means you get it regardless of whether you have any taxes to pay. There are, of course, various requirements and limitations attached to this money, the biggest of which is children. If you don't have kids, cash assistance is pretty hard to come by in the United States.

POSTSCRIPT: Note that the final year in this chart is 2022. The figures are estimated by taking 2021 outlays and adding funds in Joe Biden's rescue bill that are targeted to be spent next year.

Here's an interesting example of the importance of question wording in polling. It's from a recent survey about racism conducted in Britain:

Ask white people if there's "white privilege" in Britain, and only 29% agree. But ask them if white people have an easier time of things and 47% agree.

These are not exactly identical things, but you could legitimately treat them as pretty close to interchangeable. However, depending on the point you wanted to make, they'd provide you with very different evidence.

Choosing one over the other is not precisely lying with statistics, but it's certainly an example of how numbers can indeed lie if they aren't treated very carefully indeed.

I like taking pictures from airplane windows, but this trip was mostly a bust on that score. The best I got was a few pictures of the New York skyline as we glided into Newark Airport in Jersey. Changing planes in Newark turned out to be a horrific experience, and I feel lucky that I got home at all, let alone only a few hours late. I'm not sure how much of this clusterfuck was the fault of United Airlines; how much was the fault of the airport; and how much was just bad luck. Luckily I was flying business class, and after several tries my exalted status finally got me just enough special treatment that I got my flight rebooked and headed for home. The folks who were flying coach might still be in the airport to this day, for all I know.

Anyway, here are the three pictures I got from the plane window. Pick your favorite!

The $300-per-month Child Tax Credit seems like it should be a no-brainer. It's $300 per month! No paperwork involved! That's $3,600 each year for anyone with kids. You'd think everyone should love it. But Bill Scher reports otherwise:

The public is not yet in sync with Democratic leaders. In a mid-July Morning Consult poll, only 35 percent of voters said the expansion should “definitely” or “probably” be made permanent, with 52 percent saying the opposite. A YouGov poll from around the same time found only 30 percent of voters favored permanent expansion; 46 percent opposed it.

These numbers probably surprised Biden and other top Democrats. They certainly surprised me. As I wrote here in February, giving people money is typically a political winner. But if the expanded credit doesn’t become one, then it may not survive budget reconciliation.

I doubt that these polling numbers are a coincidence. About 40% of American households have kids, and for the most part these folks apparently like getting $300 per month. The other 60% don't have kids and are not as thrilled since they don't themselves get anything.

In other words, these poll numbers shouldn't really surprise anyone. It's also worth noting a couple of other things. First, the expanded CTC was passed in the context of responding to the pandemic, which means most people probably think about it that way. Even recipients might think that "pandemic assistance" shouldn't be made permanent.

Second, Biden's no-strings-attached CTC payments are viewed by conservatives as a return to old-style welfare. There are no work requirements, no time restrictions, and no income limits. It's just automatic money for parents who don't work. Needless to say, they aren't in favor of that.

This is hardly definitive, but progressives ought to take it as a challenge to their "just give them money" mantra when it comes to federal assistance. We already do give poor families a fair chunk of money in the form of the EITC, and it's a good bet that doling out even more cash is not really a very popular policy.

In fact, it might or might not even be good policy. For that, we'll have to wait a year or three for the wonks to study the effects of the Biden CTC.

Yesterday I said I had an idea about how to fight Fox News. So what is it?

I'll tell you. Before I get there, though, I should emphasize that I'm a "do everything" kind of guy. Boycott Fox advertisers? I don't think it will do a lot of good, but sure. Try to get Fox News taken off basic cable, where we all pay for it? We'd all love to see that, but it's unlikely in the extreme. Call out their worst excesses regularly, as Media Matters does? Definitely a good idea, but obviously it hasn't had much effect. Find some mean billionaire to launch an obsessive war against Fox News? That would be great, if we could just find one.

So fine, Mr. Smart Guy, what's your idea? Here it is: Make it toxic to work for Fox News. From the CEO down to the receptionists, make life miserable for anyone who works there. Anything legal is fair game. They should be shunned. They should be protested. They should be treated as if they worked for the Klan.

Would it work? Beats me. But it's a new idea and it's worth a try. And if this sounds a little more . . . aggressive than you're used to from moderate me, it's because I think working for Fox is about like working for the Klan. And I think its effect on our country is about as bad. Being civil toward the gleeful political pillagers at Fox just isn't going to get us anywhere.