Month: January 2023

"Defund the police" may be a rallying cry for some, but what's happened in real life? Just the opposite:

The data for 2021-22 represents my best estimate put together from a variety of sources. The number of police officers does seem to have been cut back in 2021, but not because of George Floyd. It was due instead to budget tightening as a response to the fiscal squeeze of the pandemic. The feds stepped in shortly after that with assistance to local governments, and police department staffing rebounded in 2022.

As for crime, we have a pretty good idea of what happened over the past couple of years: homicides went up and nearly everything else went down a bit. The total number of incidents continued its long-term decline.

Bottom line: Crime has plummeted since 1990 but policing hasn't. The number of police officers per crime has more than doubled over the past 30 years.

The Wall Street Journal has a rather remarkable story this weekend about CGT, the French union that represents workers in the power industry. Apparently they've taken to cutting off electricity to specific individuals as a protest against proposals to pare back the French pension system. The most curious thing about this is that everyone seems to be taking it in stride. The French government is said to be "outraged," but apparently is doing nothing more than suggesting CGT might face legal sanctions.

This got me curious about Emmanuel Macron's pension proposals, which eventually led me to this:

Some of the proposed measures, such as beefing up minimum pensions and merging France’s dozens of different retirement schemes, go down well with many people. But the government is also planning to gradually increase the minimum retirement age for most people from 62 to 64 by 2030, a move that has infuriated trade unions and the left as it would disproportionately hit low-pay workers who didn’t get a higher education and entered the job market early in life.

This is true, and it's true everywhere: High-income workers work fewer years and live a lot longer than low-income workers. Here's what that looks like for the US:

If you have 27 years of life left at age 50, you have about 15 years of life left at age 62. Cutting that by two years hurts a lot more than if you have 28 years left, as the rich do.

Here's the life expectancy differential internationally:

It surprises me that this isn't more well known. And there are ways to address it. Instead of using a retirement age, for example, you could base pensions on number of years worked. As illustration, consider this simplified scheme:

• 45 years of work is the norm.
• Anything over 1,700 hours counts as a full year.
• Anything under is pro-rated.
• Your full pension is due when you have either (a) worked 45 years or (b) reached age 67.

So if you start work at age 18, you'll get your pension at age 63. If you go to college and start work at 22, you'll get your pension at age 67. The size of your pension will still depend (partly) on how much you contributed to the system in your working years.

This doesn't eliminate the life expectancy gap, but it makes pensions a little fairer. There are other ways to do this, and other details to consider, but my point here is that it's not impossible to take this into consideration.

Dana Milbank summarizes the state of Republican budget negotiations:

House Republicans are saying they’re willing to risk default — an economic disaster — unless Biden agrees to cuts. But they won’t specify which cuts they want; Biden will just have to guess. “I want to look the president in the eye and tell me there’s not one dollar of wasteful spending in government,” McCarthy said, in his inimitable syntax.

I think we've seen this movie enough times to know exactly what they want to cut:

• Stuff that helps poor people: Medicaid, SNAP, Section 8, the EITC, WIC, Pell Grants, TANF, CHIP, SSI, school lunches, ACA subsidies, and probably some programs I've never heard of.

Beyond this they're likely to target a few programs related to climate change, wokeness, oil drilling, and anything else they can dig up that appeals to the MAGA crowd. It won't amount to much, though.

Bottom line: I guess we can keep playing this game where we pretend we don't know what Republicans want even though we all know it perfectly well. But why?

The Washington Examiner does a little examining today:

The salary for Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has nearly doubled during her six-year tenure on the job. McDaniel, who was elected as chairwoman in 2017, was paid $122,582 in her first year but made $358,431 from January 2022 through November 2022, according to Federal Election Commission data.

Hmmm. That looks like "nearly tripled," not "nearly doubled." But wait! First we have to extrapolate her 2022 salary for a full 12 months, which brings it to $390,000. That's more than tripled.

But wait again! In fairness, we have to adjust this for inflation, as we do with everything else. That brings her salary growth from $150,000 to $390,000 which is 2.6x.

That's pretty nice for six years, especially given her record. She was hired in 2017, and in 2018 Republicans got crushed in the midterm election. In 2020 Republicans lost the White House and both houses of Congress. In 2022, which should have been a "red wave" year, Republicans lost a seat in the Senate and eked out only a bare win in the House.

And yet, she was elected to a fourth term today. What's the deal here? Does McDaniel have dirt on everyone in the party? Is she the most prolific fundraiser ever? Is RNC chair an impossible job that no one else wants?

I am mystified.

Yesterday was a fine day with some Santa Ana winds blowing, which had the cats acting kind of squirrelly. Hilbert went out to the front yard and took possession of the sunny rock—his by right as king of the garden—and then Charlie decided to check out the rock too. Naturally he did this by sticking his nose up Hilbert's butt, which produced one very startled cat.

For the sake of completeness, here's the consumer spending data from today's PCE report:

Spending was down 3.4% compared to November (note that this is seasonally adjusted, so it accounts for higher average holiday spending).

Is this a sign of economic slowdown? Maybe. On the other hand, spending is still above the pre-pandemic trendline, and there was never any special reason to think this should continue forever. As excess savings continue to drain out of bank accounts, spending is likely to revert back to trend. This is especially true since income has already reverted to trend—and then some:

Spending has to catch up to earnings one of these days. I'm frankly surprised it's held out this long.

Elon Musk was in Washington DC last night to—

Well, it's not clear exactly what he was there to do. The Washington Post explains:

“Just met with Speaker McCarthy & Rep Jeffries to discuss ensuring that this platform is fair to both parties,” Musk tweeted Thursday evening.

....It remains unclear whether the main purpose of Musk’s visit was to meet with McCarthy alone. An aide to Jeffries told The Washington Post that the Democratic leader and Musk had only a coincidental encounter as the billionaire was leaving his meeting with McCarthy.

It sounds like Musk was actually at the Capitol to meet with Kevin McCarthy to discuss how Twitter could avoid pissing off Republicans. Democrats were, at most, an afterthought.

Perhaps Musk would care to comment on this? It's not as if he's media shy, after all.

Today the BEA released inflation figures for December, and there was both good news and bad news:

Headline PCE inflation dropped nearly to zero in December. That's the good news. However, core PCE inflation ticked up a bit to 3.5%. That's not terrible, but it does indicate that core inflation is dropping at a pretty moderate rate.

Food inflation dropped to 2.9% in December, continuing its steady drop since July:

Overall, this is a good report. All we have to do now is get inflation in services down and we'll be in good shape.

Today's big New York Times piece about the Durham investigation is chock full of goodies about how Donald Trump and his lackeys desperately tried to prove that the FBI had illegally opened an investigation of Trump for no good reason. Attorney General Bill Barr and his special counsel, John Durham, were obsessed about this and became increasingly agitated as their investigation continued and they were unable to find anything that backed up their suspicions. They never did. We know now that, in fact, Trump's presidential campaign did have links to the Russian government. The FBI did have a perfectly sensible reason to open an investigation into this. Vladimir Putin did try to interfere with the election in Trump's favor. And several members of Durham's team did quit because of disagreements with him over prosecutorial ethics.

There's no single smoking gun in the story, just a long series of incidents that paint a damning picture of Barr's Justice Department. In one of them, Barr received a tip from Italian intelligence:

[In 2019] the Times reported that Mr. Durham’s administrative review of the Russia inquiry had evolved to include a criminal investigation, while saying it was not clear what the suspected crime was. Citing their own sources, many other news outlets confirmed the development.

The news reports, however, were all framed around the erroneous assumption that the criminal investigation must mean Mr. Durham had found evidence of potential crimes by officials involved in the Russia inquiry. Mr. Barr, who weighed in publicly about the Durham inquiry at regular intervals in ways that advanced a pro-Trump narrative, chose in this instance not to clarify what was really happening.

Barr was normally a chatterbox, constantly tossing out tidbits about the investigation that made it seem as if they had the goods on the FBI. This time, however, he kept his mouth shut.

Why? Because the tip from the Italians linked Trump to financial crimes. That was the criminal investigation, but Barr saw no need to correct reporters who thought he was looking into criminal conduct by the FBI.

Nothing came of this investigation, but it's telling nevertheless. And it's a warning to everyone to take Durham's final report with a salt mine's worth of skepticism when it comes out. Past experience tells us that Durham will do his best to make it look like the FBI was guilty of massive crimes even though he was unable to prove any of them and unable to successfully prosecute even the minor charges he took to court.

Poor John Durham. He made his own bed, but this was partly because he got sucked into the black hole that is Donald Trump. Everyone who associates with Trump comes out of it looking worse than when they went in, and that's what happened to Durham. In 2019 he was a respected veteran prosecutor. Four years later that reputation is in tatters. Nomen amicitiae sic, quatenus expedit, haeret.

Astronomy week sputters to a close today.

My weekend trip to the desert yielded three images (the comet, the Orion Nebula, and a star trails picture), so I don't have anything for today. My only choice is to use an older astronomy photo, but I don't have any of those in the queue either.

What do do? Well, I have one picture that I eventually deleted because I never quite got it to work. So I decided to resurrect it and give it another try, which you can see below. It's the moon and Jupiter taken a few months ago, and it's OK. Not great, but OK.

Next week: the return of terrestrial photos!