Month: November 2021

President Biden is said to be pondering an "inflation offensive" that includes an FTC investigation of anti-competitive behavior in the oil and gas industry. This got me curious, so I took a super-simple look at the average markup for gasoline.

Here's what I did. I retrieved the cost of a gallon of gasoline (regular all formulations) and the price of a barrel of oil (West Texas Intermediate). I divided oil by 42 to get the cost of a gallon of oil, calculated the difference, and then subtracted taxes. The remainder was the refining/shipping/etc. markup for converting a gallon of oil at a refinery to a gallon of gasoline in consumers' hands. Here it is:

Hmmm. The markup has gone up by 20-30 cents since the beginning of the year, which is a little suspicious. On the other hand, this is obviously a pretty volatile series, and the markup today isn't out of kilter with the past few years.

Still, there are two obvious things to look at. First, why has the markup trended upward from 50 cents during the 1992-2010 period to about 80 cents today? Second, why the further spike in 2021?

There's nothing much Biden can do about the price of oil, but investigating the big refiners seems justified. Maybe there's nothing here, but it sure looks as though we should at least be asking why the markup on a gallon of gasoline is so much higher right now than it was a decade ago.

Moira Donegan writes in the Guardian today about the exit of workers from the labor force:

The fact of the matter is that when we speak of the Great Resignation, we are really referring to a great resignation of women. During the pandemic, women have exited the labor force at twice the rate that men have; their participation in the paid labor force is now the lowest it has been in more than 30 years.

This is just not true. If you follow the link, it's nothing more than an NPR host asserting it with no backup at all. Here are the real numbers:

Since the start of the pandemic, 2.31 million men have left the workforce compared to 2.38 million women. The numbers are nearly identical.

Now, there are different ways you can look at this. There are fewer women than men in the labor force, so 2.38 million women represents a larger percentage of the whole than 2.31 million men. And if you look solely at prime-age workers, about 1.4 million women have dropped out compared to 1.0 million men.

But no matter how you measure it, you'll never get women dropping out at twice the rate of men. And the absolute numbers, which are what most people probably think of when they hear about this, are very close regardless of which figures you use.

There are many ways in which women have had a harder time during the pandemic than men. The NPR segment linked above does a good job of going through them. But that hasn't resulted in a huge disparity of lost jobs between men and women. It just hasn't. Everyone needs to stop mindlessly repeating this.

POSTSCRIPT: In the realm of misleading statistics, I'd also include the factoid that women's "participation in the paid labor force is now the lowest it has been in more than 30 years." Technically this is true, but only because labor force participation for both men and women has been declining since 2000. Nearly any year represents the lowest level in the past couple of decades, and any year after a recession is automatically going to represent the lowest level going back even further. This is really a senseless statistic.

Marian and I decided long ago that we were a two-cat family, so we went looking for a new cat pretty quickly after Hopper died. I had already decided I wanted to get a kitten, since we haven't had one around here for a very long time, and we got lucky on our first visit to the Irvine animal shelter.

Meet Charlie, a 9-week-old gray tabby with explosive amounts of kitten energy. He is very sociable and very much a lap cat so far. Uncle Hilbert is wary but doing OK.

Why Charlie? What did we name him after? Charles Dickens? Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Prince Charles? Vietnam slang for enemy troops? The masculine version of Charlotte? Perhaps someday I will unravel this mystery for you.

As you can imagine, I've got a million pictures already, which makes it hard to choose just one. So I won't. Here's a whole bunch of photos to show off Charlie's many moods.

I've been paying attention to election events in Wisconsin with only half an eye, but today the New York Times caught me up on the whole sordid affair. In a nutshell, Republicans want to abolish a bipartisan election commission and instead put all voting decisions in the hands of Republicans. Remarkably, there's not even a made-up excuse for this. They just want to do it:

The onslaught picked up late last month after a long-awaited report on the 2020 results that was ordered by Republican state legislators found no evidence of fraud but made dozens of suggestions for the election commission and the G.O.P.-led Legislature, fueling Republican demands for more control of elections.

....And last week, Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, said that G.O.P. state lawmakers should unilaterally assert control of federal elections....Republican control of Wisconsin elections is necessary, Mr. Johnson said in an interview on Wednesday, because he believes Democrats cheat.

That's basically it. Democrats are cheaters—even though their own report said otherwise—so Republicans should unilaterally control all election decisions.

Welcome to the modern Republican Party. This is what Democrats should be fighting: not early voting or mail voting or photo IDs or any of that stuff. They should instead introduce a voting bill that focuses solely on the oversight of elections, making it clear that oversight should be nonpartisan and entirely out of the hands of legislatures. Even hard core Republicans are largely taken aback when they hear about this stuff, and it would cost Republicans dearly to fight a common sense bill like this.

Kyle Rittenhouse has been found innocent of all charges. I assume that the rest of the day will  be completely taken up with hysterical takes about how this (a) proves that white people can wantonly kill anyone they want and pay no penalty, or (b) finally puts an end to a sham trial that only happened in the first place because of the demands of lefty gun control nuts.

Take your pick.

Hmmm.

Here's the latest case rate of COVID-19 in the US and its peer countries in Europe. I'm not sure I can keep track of which wave we're in, but I think this is the fourth. Happy holidays, everyone.

The Congressional Budget Office dropped its analysis of the $1.8 trillion social spending bill today, and the first thing to know is that they estimate it at $1.6 trillion over ten years.

So it's now officially the $1.6 trillion social spending bill. They also figure that it will raise about $1.3 trillion in revenue over ten years. The total effect on the deficit is $367 billion over ten years.

However, this doesn't count the revenue raised by going after tax cheats, which would raise at least $200 billion over ten years according to earlier CBO projections. That brings the effect on the deficit down to $167 billion over ten years, possibly even less.

That's about $16 billion per year, which comes to a net increase in the deficit of one half of one percent. That's 0.5%.

Note that this is a ceiling. If the tax cheats generate more revenue, as many economists think they will, the effect on the deficit could be close to zero.

This is about as good as it gets in the real world, and it ought to satisfy the hawkiest of the fiscal hawks. It's time to vote.

I love pictures like this. And by "like this" I mean precisely a bunch of yellow flowers growing out of a dim, primeval setting. This is one of the better ones I've taken, part of my tour of the Honey Island Swamp.

I've been unable to find anything inspiring to write about this morning, so instead I'm resorting to serenfredity. This is similar to serendipity, but involves going to FRED and typing something random to see what comes up. Today I typed in Oklahoma.

Then I scrolled around and eventually lit on average house prices in Oklahoma City. Here they are:

I have no point to make here. It's just random data. If anyone can think of anything to say about this—especially those who live in Oklahoma City—please leave it in comments.