Cats, charts, and politics
According to the CDC's latest survey release, we set a record in the first quarter of 2022. Only 9.6% of Americans under 65 lacked health insurance:
This is probably due to increased Medicaid coverage and the expanded subsidies in the 2021 COVID stimulus bill. Note that 9.6% represents 26 million people.
Have you heard about the new 6th Street Bridge Viaduct in Los Angeles? It opened a couple of weeks ago and everyone loves it. This includes a huge number of people who have effectively shut it down by doing donuts in their muscle cars, climbing the arches, and strolling across the bridge viaduct in mass numbers.
Naturally I wanted to see that, and on Sunday I finally got up to LA to take a look. Unfortunately, the LAPD had announced that morning that they'd be out in force to bring back law and order. This is good for drivers who want to get to the other side, but not so good for photographers looking for compelling pictures.
But I was up there and I took pictures anyway. It turns out there's a pedestrian spiral down at the bottom that will take you up to the bridge viaduct, but it was too long a walk for me. However, I did go about halfway up and took a panorama shot right at sunset.
I was in Boyle Heights at that point, so I drove west across the viaduct and took pictures through the windshield of my car with the LA skyline in the background.
At the other side I found a parking space and puttered around a bit. It was too much of a hike to get anywhere interesting, so instead I returned to my car and drove east back to Boyle Heights, taking more pictures through my windshield. Note the skid marks on the roadway.
You may have seen pictures of the viaduct lit up in red and blue, but on Sunday it was lit in boring old white. So that's what you get.
Last night I posted a chart showing that housing prices had moved up and down a lot in the past 50 years and had often been higher than they are now. But you have to adjust for both inflation and mortgage rates to see this.
But what about rent? That data is a little harder to come by, but here's a decent estimate:
In real terms, average rent has gone up from around $900 in the early '80s, when my segment of boomers was graduating from college, to $1,300 today. (Then again, the annual earnings of 25-34 year-olds have increased too, which makes up a lot of the difference. Basically, rents have gone up 45% and earnings have gone up about 30%.)
This, of course, is a national average. Rents are quite a bit higher than this in Southern California, where I live, and I assume they're lower in states like Montana or Alabama. According to the Census Bureau, rents in the West right now are about 60% higher than they are in the Midwest. According to these guys, California rents are 80% higher than in the lowest-rent state, North Dakota. But that's if you use Census data (which you should). If you use Zillow data, the difference is 260%.
By the way, this is where some of the most fantastical numbers come from. Outfits like Zillow and CoreLogic deliver numbers that are monthly and up to date. This is great for the news industry, which wants to know what's happening right now. The Census, by contrast, delivers fewer numbers and they do it less frequently, so they get relegated to a blurb in the back of the business pages. But it's really the Census numbers that are more accurate, based on good survey design and not cherry picked from limited data.
Kansas had a measure on its ballot yesterday that essentially allowed the legislature to overrule a state court decision from a few years back that had protected abortion. There wasn't much else on the ballot to interest Democrats, but it didn't matter: they turned out in droves to defeat the initiative by a whopping 59-41%. Turnout was about 900,000 voters compared to 500,000 in the previous midterm election.
And this is despite the fact that Kansas remains a pretty conservative state. According to 538.com, they're the 14th most conservative state in the country, right below Mississippi and Louisiana.
It's still early days and I don't know if I'd draw any strong conclusions from this. That said, it's got to be good news for us pro-choicers that this initiative (a) got Democrats out to the polls, (b) lost in a landslide, (c) in a pretty red state. That doesn't mean we can win in Alabama or West Virginia, but it suggests that in most places abortion is an issue that Democrats can campaign and win on.
Politico reports that young people are pissed off:
While these voters are frustrated by Washington’s slow action on climate change and student debt, there’s another, often overlooked reason for their growing pessimism: The surging cost of housing has hit them harder than anyone else.
The combination of record-high home prices and escalating mortgage costs — rates have nearly doubled in the last seven months — threatens to price a generation of would-be buyers out of the market, cratering home sales.
I know everyone is tired of this particular chart of mine, but I was alive in 1981. In fact, I graduated from college that year. Here's what the housing market looked like back then:
It's true that the average house costs twice as much today as it did back then (adjusted for inflation). But 1981 was part of the big Volcker war on inflation and mortgage interest rates peaked at 17%. This means that the average mortgage payment back then was over $3,000 (again, adjusted for inflation). That's a lot more than it is today.
Those were bad times, but we made it through and bought plenty of houses. Our entire generation wasn't priced out of the market, and neither is this one. Interest rates will fall and the effective price of homes will likely return to its average of the past few decades.
This is also a chart for all the Millennials who think that boomers snapped up cheap housing back in the day and now want to pull up the ladder on younger buyers. But it ain't so. It was our parents who got cheap houses in the '50s and '60s, along with some of the older boomers. But most us faced mortgage payments over—sometimes well over—$2,000 a month. That lasted 14 years. For today's grads, it's lasted less than a year so far.
The Defense Department wiped the phones of top departing DOD and Army officials at the end of the Trump administration, deleting any texts from key witnesses to events surrounding the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, according to court filings.
[The officials include] former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, former chief of staff Kash Patel, and former Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy, among other prominent Pentagon officials.
The Pentagon's explanation is that this is routine: When anyone leaves DOD they turn in their phone and the phone is wiped. I must have at least a few readers who have worked for DOD and then left. Is this true? CNN quotes one person who's sketpical:
A former Defense Department official from a previous administration told CNN that it is ingrained into new hires during their onboarding that their work devices were subject to the Presidential Records Act and indicated their communications would be archived. The source said it was assumed when they turned in their devices at the end of their employment, any communication records would be archived.
This ought to be easy enough for an experienced Defense reporter to check out. The question, as with the Secret Service, is why this stuff isn't backed up or archived in some way. Is that routine procedure too?
This is the Long Beach skyline seen through the Seal Beach pier. The roundish building a little left of the midpoint is the Long Beach Arena. You can see the Queen Mary between the farthest left pilings. A cruise ship is docked at the far left.
I was thinking once again about the myth of deadlock the other day, and in particular I was thinking about what Joe Biden has managed to get done in his first 18 months. Here's a list of big things, ranked from top to bottom:
The bill at the bottom will move up the list when it passes. For now, however, Republicans remain an obstacle to enacting it.
But the one that really gets me is #1. For years liberals have been saying that we can't do any more good in Afghanistan and we need to withdraw—even if it's ugly and allows the Taliban to take over.
Well, it was ugly and the Taliban took over. But even now, a year later, it seems like we remain traumatized by those pictures of the first day, as if a rescue operation of this size under these circumstances could possibly start up without problems. The truth is that everyone showed monumental courage throughout the entire month of the airlift. The military risked their lives daily and rescued 124,000 people—including all but a few hundred Americans—under the worst circumstances imaginable. Since then nearly a thousand more people have been quietly flown out. The State Department moved their desks to the Kabul airport and dealt with a huge crush of work made harder by sabotage from the Trump administration. Biden stuck to his guns despite enormous pressure to cave in and stay longer.
Nothing is perfect. Big operations conducted under difficult circumstances always have a rough start. Desperate people always create chaos. Plans never survive contact with the enemy. The US certainly underestimated the incompetence of the Afghani army; the speed of the Taliban's takeover; and the cowardice of Ashrif Ghani and other senior Afghani officials who abandoned their country during the airlift.
But in the end, this was the biggest and probably most successful air rescue in history. It isn't surprising that Republicans criticize it. That's their job. But it's stunning that even Democrats have mostly stayed quiet, refusing to full-throatedly support Biden and the withdrawal. It's an act of both moral gutlessness and political stupidity.
UPDATE: The climate bill was signed into law on August 16th, so I've moved it up to the fourth spot. If and when ECRA is passed, it will move up too.
Here's the average price of gasoline as of August 1:
Adjusted for inflation, the price of a gallon of gasoline has dropped nearly a dollar. Isn't that great?
The are only two kinds of people unhappy about this. The first are climate hawks who think gasoline should be going for about ten bucks a gallon in order to keep drivers off the road.¹
Second, and far more numerous, are conservatives who are suddenly discovering that we all know the president has no influence on gasoline prices. It's funny that they didn't seem to know that when prices were going up.
And anyway, maybe the president does have some influence on gasoline prices. He can jawbone OPEC, which has worked moderately well lately. OPEC production is up and global prices of crude are down. And there's also President Biden's move to sell oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, along with his recent decision to guarantee repurchases in future years, which is likely to stabilize the market. I wasn't a big fan of this move, but who knows? Maybe it's working better than I expected.
¹During 2020-21, the price of a gallon of regular increased from $2 to above $3 and vehicle miles went up and up anyway. By the end of 2021 VMT was nearly at its pre-pandemic level even though gasoline prices were a buck higher:
But how about $5 gasoline? Did that make a dent in how much people used their cars? We don't have travel data yet from March-June, when prices went up from about $3.50 to $5, so we don't know. But retail sales data suggests only a 15% decline in miles traveled—and even that was probably only a short-term effect. I'll bet that in the long term it really would take ten-dollar gasoline to make much of a difference.
WARNING: I have deleted the original version of this post and replaced it with something completely different. Sorry.
Shall I never be rid of this stupid topic? I'm talking, of course, about the reallocation of veterans funds from the discretionary budget to the mandatory budget. Here's where I am now.
The Congressional Budget Office examined the original PACT Act on February 18 and found no reallocation. It was passed by the House on March 3 and sent it to the Senate. On June 6, in a footnote, CBO makes clear that its estimate of the bill when it passed on March 3 was the same as its original February 18 estimate. In other words, there was no reallocation in the House version.
In its June 6 analysis CBO examined the latest version of the bill while it was sitting in the Senate. In this version, they estimated that the bill would reallocate $400 billion in existing spending from discretionary to mandatory:
This estimate reflects changes in the version of the bill as posted on the website of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.
This is clear: The reallocation happened in the Senate. In a show of immense diligence and curiosity, I compared the March 3 House bill to the June 6 Senate bill. Here are the relevant sections:
| House Bill Passed on March 3 | Senate Bill as of June 6 |
|---|---|
| (b) AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS.—There is authorized to be appropriated to the Fund for fiscal year 2023 and each subsequent fiscal year such sums as are necessary to increase funding, over the fiscal year 2021 level for the Veterans Health Administration of the Department of Veterans Affairs, for any expenses incident to the delivery of veterans’ health care and benefits associated with exposure to environmental hazards in service, including administrative expenses, such as claims processing and appeals, and for medical research related to hazardous exposures. | (c) AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS.—There is authorized to be appropriated to the Fund for fiscal year 2023 and each subsequent fiscal year such sums as are necessary to increase funding, over the fiscal year 2021 level, for investment in— (1) the delivery of veterans’ health care associated with exposure to environmental hazards in the active military, naval, air, or space service in programs administered by the Under Secretary for Health; (2) any expenses incident to the delivery of veterans’ health care and benefits associated with exposure to environmental hazards in the active military, naval, air, or space service, including administrative expenses, such as information technology and claims processing and appeals, and excluding leases as authorized or approved under section 8104 of this title; and (3) medical and other research relating to exposure to environmental hazards. |
In the House bill, funding is for (a) incidental expenses such as claims processing and (b) medical research. That's new spending and would be classified as mandatory. The Senate bill includes those two but adds funding for "delivery of veterans health care." That's existing spending, and it would be redefined as mandatory. That's apparently where the $400 billion comes from.
At least, that's what CBO thinks, and I trust their legislative analysis a whole lot more than I trust mine.
So after changing my mind once again, I'm back where I started: This reallocation happened in the Senate, and that means the culprits are probably Sen. Jon Tester and Sen. Jerry Moran.