Month: October 2021

At the moment, it looks like Democrats are moving toward a version of the BBB legislation that's the exact opposite of what I'd like to see. But who cares about that? I think I have good arguments in support of my preferences, but other people think the same about their preferences. Win some, lose some.

But then there are things that would be objective disasters. For example, when Obamacare was passed, it raised the cost of private health insurance due to its minimum coverage requirements. However, its subsidies ran out at an income around $70,000. That left a whole lot of middle-class families who had to pay more for their insurance but got no help doing it.

By anyone's measure, that was not good. The only saving grace is that it affected only individual insurance, which is a very small part of the market. So some middle-class families got screwed, but not all that many.

But what if you did the same thing for a bigger program used by more people? That would be devastating. Jordan Weissmann reports that Democrats might be headed down this exact same road with child care:

The basic question is whether Democrats are about to essentially repeat the mistakes they made with Obamacare, by passing reforms that increase the quality of child care services and increase access to the poor while simultaneously making it impossible for parts of the middle and upper-middle class to afford day care. One way to avoid this issue in the long term would be to simply cap what all families have to pay at some reasonable amount, which for a moment looked like it would be the party’s approach. But on Thursday a Democratic Senate aide told me that the conversation seems to be headed toward limiting subsidies to families that earn less than 200 percent of the state’s median income.

NO NO NO NO NO! Please tell me Dems are not planning to be this stupid. Please tell me they aren't planning to screw the middle class yet again. Please tell me that Weissmann has lousy sources and should be ashamed of himself for passing this along.

Please?

Kyrsten Sinema doesn't want to raise tax rates on corporation or the rich:

But her refusal to raise tax rates on high earners and major corporations to pay for Mr. Biden’s plan is pushing Democrats toward wealth taxation and other measures once embraced only by the party’s left flank.

The frenzied search for new paths around Ms. Sinema’s tax-rate blockade has cheered liberals but raised serious qualms among more moderate Democrats, who now openly say they hope that Ms. Sinema’s business allies will pressure her to relent once they — and she — see the details of the alternatives that she is forcing on her colleagues to pay for around $2 trillion in spending on social programs and anti-climate change initiatives.

This can't possibly be right, can it? If Sinema is opposed to raising tax rates on the rich, surely she's also opposed to a wealth tax on the rich. Right? So this would create no leverage at all. She'd just tell everyone to keep looking for more acceptable funding sources.

What am I missing here?

I've been waiting for some good news on the supply chain crisis, and today I got it:

When, after months of making up reasons why a problem is temporary, people finally break down and say that it's permanent after all, it's often a sign that the problem is actually close to getting resolved. Will that be the case this time? I don't know! But I'm hopeful.

An op-ed in today's LA Times got me thinking. When we talk about employment and job openings, we shouldn't be comparing raw numbers. We should be comparing our current situation to the situation just before the pandemic. That, after all, was a very strong economy and represents about the best we can hope for. With that in mind, here are three charts. First, job openings. The dashed line represents the 2019 baseline.

Next, the labor force participation level:

Finally, the unemployment level:

On the employer side, compared to 2019, there are about 3 million more job openings than usual.

On the employee side, it would take about 2.3 million workers to get to the 2019 labor force participation level. Likewise, the unemployment rate tells that there are currently about 1.7 million more workers looking for jobs than in 2019.

This . . . suddenly doesn't look like such a crisis. Give or take a bit, you can conclude that there are 3 million more job openings than usual and about 2 million more workers looking for jobs than usual. That amounts to a worker shortage of about 1 million people.

So, yes, there's a worker shortage, and it's going to take higher wages to lure those workers back into the workforce. But in real life, the worker shortage isn't nearly as big as everyone is making it out to be.

By sticking resolutely to my guns, I am now fashionable:

I read about this just yesterday, but a bit of googling shows that I have been fashionable since at least 2018! Who knew?

This chart shows the unemployment level over the past couple of decades. Not the rate, the level:

The baseline during good economic times is about 6 million people. This represents the normal churn of people leaving jobs for a few weeks before starting up new ones. The unemployment level never gets much below this, and we're pretty close to it now.

Normally, it takes a long time to recover from a recession. As you can see in the chart, the unemployment level spiked up to 15 million in 2009 and it took until 2017 to get back to a level of 7.6 million. In the case of the pandemic, however, the spike was bigger but it's taken only 18 months to get back to 7.6 million.

This means there are about 1.7 million people left who want a job but don't have one. If employers really want more workers—and they claim to have 10 million job openings¹—they're going to have to do something to bring more people off the sidelines and into the workforce. That "something" is higher wages. There aren't very many other alternatives.

¹But see here for more context about what this really means.

At a CNN town meeting tonight, President Biden confirmed some of the rumors about the BBB legislation:

• Paid family leave has been reduced from 12 weeks to 4 weeks.
• Medicare expansion (vision, hearing, dental) has been cut.
• Negotiation of drug prices has been cut.
• Free community college has been cut.
• Kyrsten Sinema does indeed refuse to raise taxes on corporations or wealthy Americans.

Still in the mix: Clean Energy, Obamacare subsidies, child tax credit, long-term care, and child care/universal pre-K.

I don't watch evening news shows very often, but tonight I did. One of the big stories on the CBS Evening News was about how supply chain issues were causing shortages of 109 lifesaving drugs, and I was nodding along until correspondent Mark Strassmann blamed the shortages partly on "complicated market issues." That sounded sort of dodgy, so I spent 30 seconds googling drug shortages. Via the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, here's the data from 2001 through 2020:¹

Hmmm. It doesn't look as if 109 shortages is any kind of crisis. Let's zoom in:

Not only is there no crisis, drug shortages have been dropping ever since the start of the year.

I am so sick of this shit. Nora O'Donnell introduced the segment by telling us that the AMA calls drug shortages an "urgent public health crisis," and it's true that they've said that. 12 months ago. As far as the AMA is concerned, drug shortages are always an urgent crisis and they've been pushing their "framework" to address drug shortages forever. That's what lobbying groups do.

Apparently CBS News is so desperate to invent breathless supply chain stories that they randomly chose drug shortages even though the data is crystal clear that there's absolutely nothing unusual about drug shortages at the moment. In fact, we're doing better than usual. Precisely none of that context was included in Strassmann's report.

¹Contrary to the title on the chart, I believe it's showing new and ongoing drug shortages by year.

It's bad enough that our country is awash with MAGA warriors who worship Donald Trump in all his racist glory. But my bigger disappointment has always been with the mainstream Republicans who have caved in to MAGA nation.

My touchstone for this is National Review, which has long represented mainstream conservatism and was famously anti-Trump in 2016. They know perfectly well just how toxic Trump is, but they've mostly given up on doing anything about it.

Don't get me wrong. They're still technically anti-Trump, some writers more than others. But in terms of where they put their energy they might as well be full-blown supporters.

Vaccines? They're in favor of people getting vaccinated, of course. Don't you dare suggest otherwise. But when it comes to putting pixels on a screen, you won't see much in the way of criticism of Tucker Carlson. Instead you'll see opposition to mandates, snarky stuff about liberals and their mask obsessions, and attacks on the CDC.

The 1/6 insurrection? It was a travesty. But in The Corner you mostly hear from Andy McCarthy and others doing their best to derail any congressional investigation. It's totally unconstitutional, you see.

The Big Lie about election fraud? Very unfortunate. But does that mean they support any concrete action to prevent Trumpies from overturning election results they don't like? Nope. And Democratic attempts to do something about it are uniformly attacked as partisan efforts to destroy the Republican Party.

In other words, NR is anti-Trump—in theory—but has basically adopted all of Trump's talking points. It's a paper-thin difference.

Assuming anyone cares, the NR response will undoubtedly be to point to the occasional pieces that go after Trump in a genuinely concrete way—which means supporting something that risks hurting the Republican Party. Maybe an essay from maverick Kevin Williamson. Or a wonky piece from Ramesh Ponnuru, NR's intermittent truthsayer.

But overall, they've basically decided that Trump is a reality to be accepted, not a danger to be fought. And that goes for nearly everyone else in the Republican Party too.

From the Washington Post:

I can't really blame the Post for this since it's the way Democrats talk too. But I wish everyone could somehow get away from the whole "whittling" narrative. By this metric, Democrats are also whittling away at arts funding, national parks, housing aid, food stamps, breast cancer research, and a thousand other things. The only difference between these items and the BBB is that the stuff in BBB has been put on paper. But the outcome is the same: these are all things that (potentially) won't get additional funding this year.

I know I'm just whistling into the wind. It still bugs me, though.