Month: October 2022

This is from the 2022 American Family Survey:

I wonder what Republicans really think about this? If they're serious about the cause not being spending bills passed by Congress (stimulus, CHIPS Act, infrastructure, the Inflation Reduction Act), what exactly is left to blame on "Biden administration policies"? It is a mystery.

Why is core inflation (i.e., underlying inflation not affected by food and energy) so high? Most analysts cite three reasons:

First, there's high government spending, especially from the January 2021 stimulus bill. But that's back to normal:

Second, there was increased consumer demand after the COVID-19 pandemic settled down. That was a problem in 2021, but this year wages are down, savings are down, and therefore (unsurprisingly) spending is flat:

Third, there are ongoing supply chain problems. But according to the New York Fed's supply chain stress index, that's mostly gone away:

So what's left? We already know the housing market peaked earlier in the year and is now declining. The money supply has been flat since the start of the year. How about greedy multinational corporations?

I'd love to blame inflation on corporations, but it's hard to do. Pretax profits are right on the pre-pandemic trendline and they've been dead flat over the past 12 months. But maybe there's an asset bubble in stocks?

Even the stock market is back on trend, and it's down a whopping 24% since the start of the year.

Maybe it's now at the point where it's purely about inflationary expectations? That's possible, but even the one-year estimate from the Cleveland Fed is only up to 4%, which suggests that investors think headline inflation will be cut in half within a year. And the ever-reliable 5/5 breakeven rate is only slightly above its pre-pandemic trend and has been flat at about 2.4% for more than a year:

I'm stumped. If inflation is really a long-term problem that's so entrenched it can only be fought by putting a million people out of work, surely there must be some deep and profound cause. But what is it?

I was up all night doing astronomy stuff and forgot to post a lunchtime photo today! In order to restore the proper clockwork of the universe, here's a photo of young French lovers on the Paris metro actually taken around lunchtime. That's a rare thing for lunchtime photos.

Maggie Haberman has been covering Donald Trump forever, and for four years she covered him in the White House for the New York Times. Naturally she wrote a book after he left office, and lefties have been up in arms about the fact that she revealed things which perhaps should have been revealed at the time they happened instead of waiting a couple of years.

I didn't really follow this whole kerfuffle, vaguely chalking it up to the fact that lots of lefties hate Haberman for being too soft on Trump. But over the weekend I got into a Twitter conversation that got me curious about the whole thing, so I checked to see what her precise offense was. Here it is:

Former President Donald Trump repeatedly told aides in the days following his 2020 election loss that he would remain in the White House rather than let incoming President Joe Biden take over, according to reporting provided to CNN from a forthcoming book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

“I’m just not going to leave,” Trump told one aide, according to Haberman.

That's it? Sure, this would have been slightly more interesting around the time of the January 6 insurrection, but only slightly. On the list of Trump braggadocio and inanity over his four years as president, I'm not sure this even makes the top 100. On this list of "bonkers revelations" it only rates #7 in the book.

On the Kevin scale, this rates four mehs.

The Washington Post has yet another story today about the calamitous shortage of US public school teachers in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. It starts off with the headaches faced by Carolyn Stewart, the superintendent of the Bullhead City School District in Arizona:

The 2,300 students in her district had been back in school for several weeks, but she was still missing almost 30 percent of her classroom staff. Each day involved a high-wire act of emergency substitutes and reconfigured classrooms as the fallout continued to arrive in her email. Another teacher had just written to give her two-week notice, citing “chronic exhaustion.”

....Stewart had been working in some of the country’s most challenging public schools for 52 years, but only in recent months had she begun to worry that the entire system of American education was at risk of failing. The United States had lost 370,000 teachers since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Maine had started recruiting summer camp counselors into classrooms, Florida was relying on military veterans with no prior teaching experience, and Arizona had dropped its college-degree requirement.

Just to start off, I don't doubt for a second that Stewart is having trouble hiring teachers in her high-poverty school district out in the middle of the Mojave Desert. I wouldn't be surprised if they have hiring problems every single year. But Bullhead City is just one school district, so let's check the national statistics quoted in the story:

Spot on! The current number (for August 2022) is 370,000 less than the number for January 2020.

But there's a problem here: this number is for all education employees, fewer than half of whom are classroom teachers. The actual shortfall is closer to 160,000. And there's more: you really need to compare this to the number of K-12 students over the same period. Here it is:

The number of teachers is lower than it was before the pandemic, but so is the number of students. In other words, while there might really be a shortage of teachers, you have to account for the decline in the number of students to put a real number on it. And that's pretty easy. The teacher-student ratio (the gray bars) is currently 14:1 compared to 13.7:1 in 2019. A bit of simple arithmetic tells us that in order to get back to the teacher-student ratio we had before the pandemic we'd need about 70,000 more teachers.

So the real shortage is less than a quarter of the raw number quoted in the story. If Arizona is similar to the rest of the country, it's probably short about 1,500 teachers, or less than one per school.¹

If you cherry pick, you can find plenty of schools—or entire districts—that are well above that average. Bullhead City sounds like one of them. But overall, the United States K-12 system is not at risk of failing.

Not from raw numbers of teachers, anyway. If you want to make the case that the problem is dire for some other reason—for example, schools trying to handle both remote and in-person teaching until they're fully in-person again—that's fine. Make your case. But let's at least get our sums right when we do it.

¹The United States as a whole has about 95,000 public K-12 schools. If we're short 70,000 teachers, that's an average of 0.74 teachers per school.

I guess we're followers this time, not leaders, but as of 2023 jaywalking will no longer be against the law in California—as long as you do it safely:

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday signed the “Freedom to Walk” bill sponsored by Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco). The law, which goes into effect on Jan. 1, comes years after activists have argued that jaywalking rules disproportionately affect marginalized and low-income residents.

Under the new law, pedestrians would be able to legally cross the street outside of designated intersections without the threat of a hefty citation “unless a reasonably careful person would realize there is an immediate danger of collision with a moving vehicle or other device moving exclusively by human power.”

It sounds like woke activists were mostly responsible for this burst of common sense, not pedestrian interest groups. So let me be the first to say thanks to California's marginalized and low-income folks—and the cops who hassle them—for providing the excuse to pass this law.

The New York Times reveals why the Supreme Court has become so distrusted of late:

The actual cause of its historic unpopularity is no secret. Over the past several years, the court has been transformed into a judicial arm of the Republican Party.

Yep. The modern Republican Party consists of three branches: the Supreme Court, Fox News, and Donald Trump. Congratulations to SCOTUS for its official entry into this triumvirate.