Month: October 2021

The 2021 edition of the American Family Survey is out, and it has lots of data about the state of the American family. None of it struck me as super noteworthy, though, until I got to this:

Among all income groups, there was a sharp drop in families experiencing an economic crisis during both pandemic years. In other words, the gigantic aid bills worked.

Among other things, this is yet more evidence for why the end of the eviction moratorium doesn't seem to have been a big deal. Low-income families, who are the ones most vulnerable to eviction, have been better off over the past two years than they were pre-pandemic. This means they've mostly kept up with their rent and aren't in any more danger of being evicted than ever. This jibes with the latest Household Pulse Survey, which was released a few days ago:

There was a slight uptick in rent anxiety in the early September survey, but it was just a blip. In the late September survey, things ticked back down to normal.

This is a Bateleur eagle at the San Diego Zoo. According to the repository of all human knowledge, bateleur is French for either "street performer" or "tumbler," depending on which contributor you choose to believe. In any case, he looks mean. If you had face off against one of these guys in the octagon, you'd be toast.

Tomorrow is inflation day, but to keep us occupied until then we got new JOLTS data today for the month of August:

These numbers are peculiar: there were about half a million fewer jobs filled than in July (fewer hires + more quits) but that didn't cause job openings to increase. It caused them to decrease by about half a million.

Meanwhile, during the last 12 months quits have increased by 1.3 million. It sure doesn't look like people are worried about finding another job even though the number of hires is lower than it was a year ago.

The job market seems to make little sense these days. People are quitting their jobs in increasing numbers, which is normal during an economic recovery, but employers aren't hiring more people—which is very much not normal during a recovery. So what happened to all these people who quit their jobs? Why didn't employers try harder to keep them? And is the gap between job openings and hires really as huge as it seems?

The conventional theory at the moment is that workers are "holding back," living off their sweet government bennies while they look for better jobs. Increasingly, though, this doesn't make a lot of sense. I mean, sure, a lot of the jobs on offer are crappy—fast food, retail, delivery, etc.—but are there really millions of people who are convinced they can do better just because a year has passed? That strikes me as a surprisingly unrealistic view of things.

As for employers, a huge gap between job openings and hires should prompt them to offer sharply higher wages. Within traditional low-wage industries, there's evidence of this in leisure and hospitality, but not elsewhere:

Hum de hum. If it seems like I'm rambling, it's because I am. I truly don't know exactly what to make of all this. It's almost as if workers and employers are playing a game of chicken, waiting to see who caves in first.

So far, President Biden has taken a very Obama-ish no-drama attitude toward his big spending bill. This is probably smart. Things may look messy now, but he knows that once something gets passed everyone will soon forget the sausage-making that went into it.

Still, surely all the actors in this little drama—Manchin, Sinema, moderates, progressives, activists—understand that they all have a vested interest in the success of the Democratic Party. Like it or not, it's the only game in town, and the longer they keep fighting the more inept and feeble the party looks. There's plenty of time to overcome this, but not an infinite amount of time. And yet, no one seems much interested in getting something out the door now while the next debt ceiling crisis is still a couple of months away.

It's time to do a deal, folks. Obamacare expansion, childcare, family leave, and long-term care should be the top priorities. Those are programs that can be sold as middle-class benefits even though they help everyone, poor and middle class alike. And they're concrete programs, things that are easily understood and that help out with concrete problems that affect a huge chunk of the population.

They're also things that everyone can get behind. Unlike Obamacare, which Democrats largely ran away from in 2010, there's no one who needs to run away from any of these things. They're popular, and they deserve to be popular. If Democrats campaign on them, they'll be associated with the party forever, just like Social Security and Medicare.

You may remember me griping a while back that it was impossible to take a good picture of our new bridge unless I had a blimp or something. I still don't have a blimp, but I do have a drone, and it turns out to indeed be a perfect tool for bridge photography. So here you go. The top photo is the Gerald Desmond Bridge during the day. The middle photo is the same view at night. And the bonus bottom photo shows both the old and new bridges.

I may try this again next June, when the morning sun provides better light. Maybe.

Check this out:

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said he would step down following accusations of corruption less than two years after his re-election.

Mr. Kurz’s departure is the latest blow for conservatives in Western Europe, who have been struggling in recent years. Germany’s Christian Democratic Union lost a national election last month after leading the government for the past 16 years under Chancellor Angela Merkel. Conservatives are in the opposition from France to Spain and Portugal.

A couple of years ago democracy was on the run as right-wing parties around the world took power. Today they're all struggling to remain relevant. It's remarkable how times change, isn't it?

Is the Fed planning to taper support for the economy too soon? After all, Delta had a bigger effect than they had predicted, and the jobs market is still pretty sluggish. Maybe they should hold off?

Maybe. But much of this concern is based on slow employment growth and the "missing millions" of jobs. Anecdotally, though, workers say no one will hire them and employers say they can't find workers—and no one seems to know what's really going on here. Meanwhile, the headline unemployment rate is a very respectable 4.8%.

As for me, I keep coming back to simple stuff like this:

As you can see, consumer spending caught up to its old trendline in March and has been precisely where it should be ever since. You'd need a microscope to suss out any kind of weakness relative to trend.

As long as consumer spending keeps rising, it's hard for me to think there's anything badly wrong with the economy. But I could be wrong about this. Maybe spending is being propped up by households that are drawing down their savings, and it will collapse when savings are used up. And there's still the job market weirdness to figure out. And GDP still hasn't quite caught up to potential.

Still, it looks to me like our recovery is close to complete. Not totally, but pretty close.

There is a cat hidden in this picture. Can you find him?

Ever since Pat Caddell became famous as the wunderkind pollster of the Jimmy Carter campaign, it seems as if there's always been a data geek of the moment who becomes both a guru and a lightning rod within the progressive movement. Today's DGOM is David Shor, an obsessive number cruncher who worked for the Obama campaign in 2012 and then achieved notoriety by getting himself fired last year from Civis Analytics, a progressive data science firm.

Today it's Ezra Klein's turn to interview Shor. Let's listen in:

At the heart of Shor’s frenzied work is the fear that Democrats are sleepwalking into catastrophe....Shor has built an increasingly influential theory of what the Democrats must do to avoid congressional calamity. The chain of logic is this: Democrats are on the edge of an electoral abyss. To avoid it, they need to win states that lean Republican. To do that, they need to internalize that they are not like and do not understand the voters they need to win over. Swing voters in these states are not liberals, are not woke and do not see the world in the way that the people who staff and donate to Democratic campaigns do.

All this comes down to a simple prescription: Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.

Unfortunately, this doesn't go nearly far enough. It's simply not possible in the era of Fox News to talk only about what you want to. The opposition gets a vote too, and Fox News will relentlessly hammer progressives at our weakest points even if we could, miraculously, get everyone to agree to shut up about our less popular views.

The problem with progressives today isn't messaging. It's our actual views. Let's run down a few of the more obvious examples:

Immigration. As recently as 2013 liberals were mostly on board with the compromise immigration bill backed by Marco Rubio. Today it would be a laughable nonstarter. During the Democratic primary debates, there was barely any daylight at all between the center of gravity of Democratic opinion and a policy of full-on open borders. Within the progressive movement, you will almost never hear even the slightest support for any kind of immigration enforcement.

The Great Awokening. Can we all agree, at a minimum, that woke culture has gone a bit too far? No? Not even that?

OK then, can we agree that, to an average, ordinary, nonpolitical, middle-class man on the street, wokeism has gone too far? That it's become more than just a few college kids blowing off steam and it needs to be reined in?

It's instructive that Shor himself became famous for being fired due to a lack of sufficient wokeness. What was his sin? During the George Floyd protests last year, he cited research by a Black scholar showing that while nonviolent protests helped Democrats, violent protests hurt them. This was judged beyond the pale and Shor was let go.

The Welfare State. There's nothing new about this. Democrats and Republicans have been at war over the social safety net forever.

But there's something that progressives simply refuse to admit about it: we won. Over the past few decades safety net spending has skyrocketed to nearly a trillion dollars a year—and that's just federal spending. What's more, it's not being hollowed out or chipped away or anything close to it. Spending has gone steadily up, up, up, and it's stayed up even though Republicans may hate it.

Despite this, progressives relentlessly insist that welfare spending is on the verge of collapsing, and that poor people in the US are practically sleeping in the gutters. None of that is true. There are, obviously, people at the very bottom of the income ladder who are truly in terrible need. But not that many. Even near the bottom, the average poor household receives something like $35-40,000 in cash and government benefits.

Despite that, we remain so obsessed with the poor that we've almost entirely given up on the middle class. Is it any wonder they've given up on us?

I won't go on about this forever. I assume I've made my point, and I assume it's every bit as unpopular as I think it is.

But it's for real. A lot of progressives don't really get this because they're college educated and all their friends are college educated too. They simply don't have any friends who are working or lower middle class that they can talk to honestly. If they did, some of this stuff would be a whole lot more obvious.

To accept all this, you don't have to be the kind of person who thinks "Defund the Police" was responsible for Democratic losses in 2020. You merely have to be outside your bubble enough to acknowledge that it sure as hell didn't help. Are you?

The American economy gained 194,000 jobs last month. The unemployment rate declined from 5.2% to 4.8%.

This makes two months in a row of disappointing job growth, once again led by a collapse of growth in government jobs.

Why is job growth so anemic in the face of huge demand for workers? Expanded UI benefits have been ended completely, so that's not the explanation. But here's one possibility:

During the pandemic recession, personal savings skyrocketed as people socked away some of the government benefits they received. Then, as those benefits started to fade, they began drawing down those savings. However, savings remain higher than normal, suggesting that a fair number of workers are still living off savings while they look for a job. When those savings run out, they'll start to get a little more realistic and will begin accepting job offers that are OK but not great.

Maybe! This is just a guess on my part. But it makes sense.