Month: November 2021

Do we have a shortage of truck drivers?

It sure doesn't look like it. And before you ask, the numbers look the same if you break them down by local and long-distance truckers. There are as many at work today as there were in the month before the pandemic started.

Nor do trucking companies seem to want more drivers. Trucker pay had been increasing steadily for years but flattened out in 2021. If companies were desperate for more drivers, we'd see a continuing increase in wages.

None of this means there might not be shortages in specific regions or specific industries. But overall, we seem to have as many people driving trucks today as we did two years ago.

This is a typical little restaurant in Rome a few blocks from my hotel. You can't tell from the picture, but it was still about 90 degrees at 10 pm when I shot this. That's why I didn't eat dinner out during the whole time I was there. It was just too hot for me to feel like eating pasta or some similar dish. All I wanted were cold things direct from the refrigerator.

In order to pay for his social welfare bill, President Biden plans to crack down on tax cheats. He thinks this will save about $300 billion, but the Congressional Budget Office is expected to disagree, scoring it in the neighborhood of $200 billion. If this happens, it means that the bill would increase the deficit and Democrats would need to cut back on spending to return it to deficit neutrality.

Lefties are crying foul over this, pointing out that Republicans increased the deficit by $1.9 trillion when they passed their 2017 tax bill. Where was the CBO then?

This is a misunderstanding. In 2017 Republicans wrote a $1.5 trillion deficit directly into the reconciliation instructions. The CBO then scored their bill at $1.9 trillion, but Republicans ignored the CBO and produced their own estimates after jiggling around some of the details of the tax cut. Then they passed the bill. They did this because they never really cared about deficits in the first place.

So can't Democrats do the same thing? Sure, except that they do care about deficits. Or, to be more precise, Joe Manchin cares about deficits. Legally, Democrats can produce their own estimate of the bill's impact on the deficit, but it doesn't matter. It won't pass unless Manchin is on board.

So the CBO score is only important if Manchin thinks it is. Which apparently he does. That's it. That's the only reason the CBO score matters.

The Steele dossier is back in the news because it turns out that one of its sources lied about some stuff. Something like that, anyway.

Unfortunately, I never paid a lot of attention to the dossier so I'm a little unsure of why we should care about this. It was always presented as raw, unverified intel, and it played no role in launching the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign. There's also no reason to believe it ever played much of a role in the later stages of the investigation. As I recall, it showed up only as a footnote in a FISA application for surveillance of a minor player, and that was about it.

But maybe I'm missing something. Aside from the "pee tape" mania, which was more snark than anything else, did the dossier play a bigger role in events than I remember? I guess it was a bigger deal on TV than in print? Maybe that slid by me since I almost never watch political shows on cable.

Apologies for the lack of posting this morning. I've been engaged in a vitally important photographic mission trying to identify a strange blur that showed up in our house a couple of days ago. So far I've not had much luck, but I'll keep trying.

Hmmm. We have a lot more jobs than we thought:

In the most recent four months with revisions, June through September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported it underestimated job growth by a cumulative 626,000 jobs — that’s the largest underestimate of any other comparable period, going back to 1979. If those revisions were themselves a jobs report, they’d be an absolute blockbuster.

This is a bit of a pattern. The Afghanistan withdrawal turned out to be a lot better than we initially thought based on the disasters of the first day. The economy is better than we initially thought based on early prints of the jobs reports. The infrastructure bill is good stuff but has to overcome the initial political infighting that slowed it down.

That's bad luck for the Biden crew. But better than the other way around, I suppose.

This is the Ferris wheel at the Spectrum, a local shopping center, with the moon rising behind it. Needless to say, I took this picture with the drone.

The latest edition of the Survey of Consumer Sentiment is out, and it shows that Republicans have doubled down on their hysteria over the economy:

At the start of the pandemic, everyone naturally became pessimistic about the economy. But after a few months, as assistance started to roll out, sentiment stabilized.

Until November 3rd. Sentiment among Democrats had already been going up, and it continued rising until the middle of 2021, when it took a modest downward dip.

But Republicans went cuckoo when Donald Trump lost the presidential election. Consumer sentiment plummeted, and kept plummeting for over a year. In November it came in at 37.2, the lowest it's ever registered.

By far the lowest. Lower than the 1980 Carter recession (55.1) and lower than the Great Recession (48.3).

This is nuts, given the extensive real-world evidence that the economy is in pretty good shape. It only makes sense if you've been repeatedly hammered over the head that deficits and inflation are the only things that matter and they're all set to crush the economy any day now.

But where would anyone get that idea?

I accidentally got a copy of the Orange County Register today instead of my usual LA Times, and on page A10 there's a short AP dispatch headlined "Russia gets blamed for threatening space junk." This was due to a Russian missile destroying an old satellite and creating a huge cloud of debris that posed a danger to the International Space Station.

What a disappointment. That headline is so bland. So weak. So appease-y. Back in the day, it would have been the front page lead story and it would have been headlined, "REDS THREATEN US ASTRONAUTS."

Only oldsters will get this joke, but that's OK. We oldsters have a thousand more like this, which I suppose is why we take Fox News so seriously but remain a little less troubled by social media.

POSTSCRIPT: Joking aside, wtf Russia? What's the deal behind pulling an insane stunt like this?

Retail spending was up in October:

This is yet another indicator that the economy is still running hot and will probably continue to do so as long as savings remain high and stimulus money is coursing through the nation's households.

How long will this last? I don't know, but I'd take a horseback guess that $2 trillion might take a year or so to burn itself out. In other words, high spending and the resulting high inflation might well last until March of 2022 or so.

Just a guess!