I would like to show you a few charts. First up is corporate profits:
Not bad! Not only is the long-term trendline nicely up, but the pandemic has been good to American businesses. Profit before taxes has spiked up 82% since the start of 2020.
And speaking of taxes, those are down, down, down:
Back in the bad old days, nonfinancial corporations paid 30-40% of their profits to Uncle Sam. Today, after big drops thanks to the first Bush tax cut and the Trump tax cut, the average tax rate is down to 14%. Ka-ching!
Put this all together and you get this:
This is not a common metric, but it's an interesting one. Generally speaking, we all believe that corporations deserve to be profitable if they produce a lot of value-added. That's only fair. But that isn't quite what's happened. Back in the 1990s, corporations earned 4-8 cents per unit of value-added. Today, after the big pandemic profit spike, they earn 16 cents per unit. This means that even if they plod along and produce exactly as much value-added every year, their profit has more than doubled.
That's a helluva nice pay plan! So you'd think that since the pandemic has been good to corporations and they're desperate for workers, they'd happily raise wages. Let's take a look:
Nope. Wages went up a bit during the spike right at the beginning of the pandemic, when companies were paying "essential worker" bonuses and so forth, but they've been dropping ever since the start of 2021. Real wages today are 2% lower than they were a year ago.
I leave further analysis as an exercise for my readers.
I've never liked this argument. Partly it's because I dislike the whole framing of war as weak or strong, but mostly it's because this is such an unconvincing bit of sophistry. I mean, does anyone really believe that refusing to fight shows resolve and strength?
I don't mean this as anything against Bernie. He's just parroting a common liberal refrain here. But regardless of whether it's true or not, I really don't think anyone buys it. Why not simply frame it in terms of national interest instead?
The announcement Tuesday that Bauer will not face criminal charges in relation to the sexual assault allegations against him swings open the door to an unlikely but nonetheless untenable scenario....He’s theoretically available to return to work as soon as baseball goes back to work and, well, the Dodgers have a desperate need for starting pitchers and ...
They wouldn’t ... they couldn’t ...
They’d better not.
It’s time for the Dodgers to do what they should have done months ago. It’s time for them to publicly disown Trevor Bauer by promising their fans and community he will never again take the mound in a Dodgers uniform. It’s one sentence. It speaks volumes.
Trevor Bauer will never pitch for us again.
For those of you who have no idea what this is about, I recommend you maintain your blissful innocence.
For the rest of you, here's what to know. First: Trevor Bauer is something of a jerk. This is hardly unusual in baseball, but there you have it.
Second: last year he was accused by a woman of sexual assault. A thorough investigation was performed and no charges are being filed. Bauer, it turns out, likes rough sex. There's considerable evidence in this case that the rough sex was entirely consensual and Bauer simply didn't do anything wrong. As always, we don't know this absolutely, 100% for sure. We never do. But Bauer's case is so strong that a judge wouldn't even maintain a restraining order against him, which isn't something that requires a hell of a lot of evidence.
Bottom line: Bauer is a jerk and he likes something that most of us find distasteful. That's it. If the Dodgers want to let Bauer go as a message that they too supposedly find rough sex distasteful, I guess that's their business. They run a family operation, after all. But it would be nothing more than that.
POSTSCRIPT: Needless to say, further evidence might come to light in the future. If it does, then we might want to change our minds. That's the way evidence works.
Is the federal government doling out crack pipes to addicts in Black neighborhoods? The Washington Free Beaconsays yes, the Biden administration says no.
This squabble is linked to a $30 million harm reduction grant designed to make drug use safer for addicts. This sort of program has been familiar for decades and includes funding for things like clean needles, Narcan, and so forth. However, the program in question also approves the distribution of "safe smoking kits/supplies," which is the origin of the current outcry. The semantic hair-splitting over whether this counts as "crack pipes" seems to be based on whether the kits include only mouthpieces, screens, and disinfectant wipes; or whether they also include the glass pipes themselves. On such things are culture wars built.
So what's the real story? If you google it, all you'll find is a thousand hits related to today's story. This is common, so I find that it's useful to google terms with a date restriction in order to find out what people were saying about them before they became the latest Fox News jihad.
In this case, I didn't find a lot. But last April Maryland handed out some safe smoking kits (including glass pipes) and the chairman of the Caucus of African American Leaders of Anne Arundel County was not amused:
Snowden shared photos showing a number of items from the handouts including a toothbrush, comb, latex gloves, snacks, Narcan, drug tests, tourniquets, syringes, and crack pipes. “We were very, very clear that crack pipes is where we draw the line,” said Snowden.
This is a very attractively packaged safe smoking kit, complete with glass pipes.
Why does Vancouver have a crack pipe vending machine?
Free crack pipes have been a staple at the center for years, but leaders decided to try something new when they couldn't keep up with demand for the pipe's glass stems, which can shatter from the heat of overuse, cut users' mouths, and spread disease if shared.
So Mark Townsend, PHS's manager, figured they might as well try something cheap and easy — like a vending machine. And the colorful contraption, which used to sell sandwiches, works pretty much as you'd expect. Put a quarter in the slot, press the number, wait for the metallic ring to twist and pull the cardboard sleeve, similar to one used to roll coins, out from the tray. Voila.
The machine and its twin at a nearby shop recover the cost of the pipes, don't need to be managed by staff and, with space for about 200 pipes, are restocked about twice a week. They operated for almost eight months before anyone in the international media noticed, a bemused Townsend remarked.
Apparently Vancouver has been offering nearly-free crack pipes "for years" prior to 2014. So maybe 2010 or so?
That's about the earliest reference I could find. The upshot, I guess, is that safe smoking kits have been around for at least a decade but don't seem to be super common compared to needles, wipes, HIV meds, and so forth. For the most part nobody seems to notice them, but occasionally they do and then there's a bit of a backlash. I'm not quite sure why clean pipes are any different from clean needles, but then again, clean needles have been a reliable left-right wedge issue for many years. So I suppose it's no surprise that pipes are too.
Anyway, that's that. Safe smoking kits have been around for a while, but this is the first time they've been funded as part of a federal program. Today someone found out about it and it produced one of the tedious micro-furors that rule our lives these days.
I couldn't care less about it. But your mileage may vary.
To go along with yesterday's list of big things that we've done over the past couple of decades, here's a shorter list of big things that we tried to do but couldn't:
Social Security privatization
Cap and trade
Comprehensive immigration reform (twice!)
Constructing a wall on the southern border
Build Back Better
These are things that presidents put a lot of energy into but couldn't push over the top. Am I missing any? And does this list tell us anything?
This is a big pile of mussel shells that have built up on the top of a concrete retaining wall at Seal Beach. It makes a very nice black-and-white composition.
Some time ago I became interested in this question too. More broadly, I was also interested in whether high school kids are less educated now than they used to be.
But this turns out to be an almost impossible question to answer. Oh, you can answer it pretty well if you only go back to 1992,¹ but I wanted to go back farther. At least to the 1950s, and ideally back to the turn of the 20th century.
There's some suggestive evidence going back that far, but it's really hard to find anything definitive. Eventually my interest flagged and I moved on to other things. But I did find one interesting little nugget that's been sitting on my computer for a while, and I suppose this is a good time to share it. It's a comparison of basic political knowledge based on a 1989 survey that asked the same questions as a 1940s/50s survey:
As you can see, the authors found that 1989 Americans were more knowledgable on practically every question except the ones that asked about specific people. Apparently we have better book knowledge of political questions, but we don't care as much about who the actual people are who represent us.
This is just one survey, and not to be taken too seriously. Still, if it's true it's sort of interesting—and speaks even more highly of our collective political knowledge. After all, it really has become less important in the modern era to care about the specific individuals who represent us, especially in Congress. All that matters is what party they belong to.
Anyway, this is an interesting tidbit and I thought I'd share it. Draw your own conclusions.
¹People are neither more misinformed nor less educated than they were in 1992. I'd say the evidence is fairly overwhelming on this point.
Not bad! Not only is the long-term trendline nicely up, but the pandemic has been good to American businesses. Profit before taxes has spiked up 82% since the start of 2020.
Back in the bad old days, nonfinancial corporations paid 30-40% of their profits to Uncle Sam. Today, after big drops thanks to the first Bush tax cut and the Trump tax cut, the average tax rate is down to 14%. Ka-ching!
This is not a common metric, but it's an interesting one. Generally speaking, we all believe that corporations deserve to be profitable if they produce a lot of value-added. That's only fair. But that isn't quite what's happened. Back in the 1990s, corporations earned 4-8 cents per unit of value-added. Today, after the big pandemic profit spike, they earn 16 cents per unit. This means that even if they plod along and produce exactly as much value-added every year, their profit has more than doubled.
Nope. Wages went up a bit during the spike right at the beginning of the pandemic, when companies were paying "essential worker" bonuses and so forth, but they've been dropping ever since the start of 2021. Real wages today are 2% lower than they were a year ago.
