Cats, charts, and politics
This is Charlie testing out our new area rug. He seems to approve, which is a good thing since we got it because the old rug had to be vacuumed practically every day to get rid of all the Charlie fur. We are hoping the new one hides the fur more effectively so we can return to a more normal weekly cleaning cycle.
A newly released property inventory from the Mar-a-Lago search indicates that the FBI found lots of classified documents. We already knew that. But they also found lots of folders marked classified but with no documents inside:
In Box No. 2, for example, taken from Trump’s office, there were 43 empty folders with classified banners; 28 empty folders labeled “Return to Staff Secretary/Military Aide”; 24 government documents marked confidential, secret or top secret; 99 news articles and other printed media; and 69 government documents or photos that were not classified.
It seems unlikely that even Donald Trump would take a bunch of empty folders from the White House as keepsakes or whatever. So what used to be in these empty folders?
There might be an innocent explanation. Maybe Trump took the documents out and put them somewhere else, where they've already been collected by either NARA or the FBI.
Maybe. But the most obvious explanation is that something happened to those documents. Trump could still have them. Or he might have destroyed them. Or he might have given them to someone.
As the Washington Post says, this is a developing story. And it's getting fishier with every passing day. Where are the missing documents?
The American economy gained 315,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 225,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate went up a bit to 3.7%.
This is an almost perfect jobs report. It's healthy enough that it means the economy continues to hum along, but it's weaker than recent jobs reports, which means the Fed doesn't have to get panicked about the economy overheating.
So what happened in August? In a nutshell, lots of new people entered the labor force. Some of this was due to population growth, but there were about 600,000 workers in addition to that, probably due to high school grads entering the job market. Of this total growth of nearly 800,000, about 450,000 of them were employed and 350,000 were unemployed, which is why both the unemployment rate and the labor force participation rate went up:
Wages went up 0.2% on an annualized basis. When you account for the -0.2% inflation rate in July, that means real wages went up 0.4%. Woo hoo. But it's better than going down, which is what wages have been doing lately.
From the editor of National Review:
It’s amazing that Biden and his team feel comfortable lecturing us about the rule of law and the Constitution without feeling the slightest self-consciousness about his having just lawlessly spent up to $1 trillion…
They think they can get away with it—and they’re right
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) September 2, 2022
I swear I will never understand this kind of thing. NR is institutionally anti-Trump. They are specifically opposed to Trump's disdain for the law and his Big Lie about winning the 2020 election. So even if there are things about Biden's speech Lowry dislikes—Biden's a liberal, Lowry's a conservative, so it's no surprise if there are—it's still the case that it was mostly an anti-Trump speech that specifically called out Trump's disdain for the law and his Big Lie about winning the 2020 election.
That sounds great. But what does Lowry spend his time on? His pique over Biden "lecturing" us and his outrage over Biden "lawlessly" cancelling some student debt. For chrissake. There's nothing lawless about it. This is just a routine disagreement that will be settled in court. Maybe Biden will win, maybe he'll lose. But either way, presidents do this kind of thing all the time, and they're forced to defend it in court all the time.
So why not spend more time on the core of the speech instead? Would it kill Lowry to say that Biden is basically right and then add some caveats? How are Republicans ever going to rid themselves of Trump if no one with an audience is willing to do even that much?
This is Honey Island swamp in Louisiana. I took this picture at the end of the tour as the sun was going down, which helped provide an interesting sky. I wish I could have taken it an hour later, but you take your pictures at the tour times you have, not the tour times you wish you had.
How are Democrats doing at the moment? Here are three takes on the generic congressional ballot during the last week of August:
Morning Consult has Democrats ahead by four points. The two aggregators have it at about a tie. All three show Democrats doing about four points better than a couple of months ago.
Conventional wisdom says that congressional balloting is so skewed these days that Democrats need to be winning the generic ballot by 6-7 points before they have a chance of winning the House. So we're still not there yet. But at least we're making progress.
Do you need a good job but don't have any skills? Move to California! We just passed a bill that sets up a Fast Food Council, and among other things it's tasked with setting a new minimum wage for the industry. The legislation caps the minimum wage at $22 per hour in 2023, which presumably means the minimum wage will be $22 per hour.
That's not bad. It's only a couple of bucks short of what a beginning teacher makes. It's 25% higher than the individual median income. It's more than a bookkeeper makes. It's more than a lab tech makes. It's more than a delivery driver makes. It's more than an EMT makes. It's more than a construction worker makes. It's more than a carpenter makes.
Anyway, it seems a wee bit high to me. Maybe the new council will keep it lower than $22. Or maybe Gov. Gavin Newsom won't sign the bill. Who knows?
My plea for everyone to react calmly to the NAEP's test scores of fourth-graders during the pandemic has apparently been ignored:
These headlines are technically correct: Scores declined to the level of 1999, which is indeed "decades." (Two of them.) But that was possible only because we had made such small gains since then in the first place.
I predict that on the 2024 NAEP test we will make up almost all of the progress "lost" during the pandemic. Kids are pretty resilient when it comes to stuff like this.
The only exception I'd point to is the astonishing 13-point drop among Black kids on the math test. That's pretty serious stuff, and it won't be easy to make up.