Month: April 2023

BLS announced usual weekly earnings for full-time workers today. It's a quarterly series, and the latest reading is for the first three months of 2023.

Compared to the previous quarter, men's earnings were down $7. Women were up $8. The combined total was up 81 cents.

Since the first quarter of 2020, men's earnings are down $51 and women's earnings are down $2. The combined total was down $12 (-1%). This, of course, means the economy is running too hot and we need to drag workers down even further.

NOTE: Just as a reminder, corporate profits were up $830 billion (+59%) over the same period.

Here's a tweet that's been making the rounds:

Talked to the @budlight beer salesman at the store today. He shared that he has never seen such non-movement of their products in his 15 years. Even in rural communities no product is being sold. The cooler was completely full of Bud products-not 1 case was sold since yesterday… pic.twitter.com/sNCjDIWmjQ

— TennesseeTruthSeeker (@TennesseeMAGA13) April 16, 2023

Anything is possible, I suppose, but according to actual data Bud Light sales are down -5.6% for the year compared to -10.7% during the first week of the boycott.¹ That's a net drop of five percentage points, which is considerably more believable than "not 1 case was sold since yesterday."

¹As their own VP of marketing said recently, Bud Light has "been in decline for a really long time." She added, "If we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand, there will be no future for Bud Light." This helps explain why Bud Light is doing things like partnering up with trans influencers.

On Saturday night I went out to the desert for my last astrophotography session until I recover from my upcoming CAR-T treatment. Call it four or five months.

But I was excited to go because my astro weather website was forecasting top notch conditions. It was not to be. Conditions were perfectly fine, but not especially great, so my prime target for the night turned out nicely, but not quite as nicely as I'd hoped.

There isn't much to see in April, so I was limited in my choice of targets. I ended up choosing the Pinwheel Galaxy, a large-ish galaxy that appears face-on from our neck of the woods. It sports some very pretty blue and magenta sparkles that I enhanced just because I felt like it, and I was able to pick up a fair amount of detail using 10-minute exposures for about five hours.

The little blob at the far right is NGC5477, a dwarf galaxy of no special interest.

I suppose this is a longshot, but can anyone tell me the difference between federal expenditures and federal outlays? I wouldn't care too much except for this:

The two lines are generally the same, but outlays show a big spike in Q3 of 2022 while expenditures don't. This spike is specifically in September, as you can see in the monthly chart:

Are outlays the amount budgeted, while expenditures are what actually went out the door? No. According to the Treasury Monthly Statement, outlays represent the actual flow of money out of the Treasury.

This is probably one of those things with an obvious answer that I will be embarrassed to learn I had missed. But what is it?

Republican doubletalk on the economy was kicked up a notch today:

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy proclaimed Monday that Republicans would not allow the government to default on its debts, even as he labored to sell Wall Street on a risky fiscal showdown with the White House that could unleash vast economic turmoil.

Speaking at the New York Stock Exchange, McCarthy (R-Calif.) affirmed his party’s plan to seize on a rapidly approaching deadline — an urgent need to raise the debt ceiling, which sets how much Washington can borrow to pay its bills — to extract spending cuts and other policy concessions from President Biden.

Fucking Republicans. I wouldn't normally use such language, but my cancer treatment is just a few days away now. When I eventually get back I can pretend that I was mad with anxiety and hardly knew what I was saying.

In the meantime, fucking Republicans. McCarthy is doing this because it's one of the promises he had to make to the fuckwit wing of the party before they'd support his nomination to the speakership:

But McCarthy’s speech belied the risks in the GOP’s political gambit, which threatens to sink the stock market, thrust millions of Americans from their jobs and jolt the global financial system. The stakes seemed only more glaring given McCarthy’s choice to deliver his remarks in the beating heart of Wall Street.

For the moment, Wall Street doesn't care because investors assume that it's all just talk and McCarthy will eventually back down. And I suppose that's likely. But before it happens, Republicans may be responsible for tipping a fragile economy into recession.

Not that they care. After all, immiserating millions of people will be good for their electoral chances in 2024. Eyes on the prize, people.

On Thursday we learned that Clarence Thomas's billionaire friend, Harlan Crow, had bought some of Thomas's property at an above-market price and then spruced it up for Thomas's mother. Thomas disclosed none of this. Seems like an important story! Nevertheless, the Washington Post ran only a short online AP dispatch about it that day¹ and didn't bother mentioning it at all in the print edition.

Today we learned that for many years Thomas has been reporting income from Ginger Ltd., a defunct company. He should have been reporting income from its successor, Ginger Holdings, LLC. This seems like a very trivial story, but the Post ran it at the top of its front page in the print edition.

Why the difference? Because the first story wasn't originally reported by the Post. The second one was.

So stupid.

¹A staff-written reaction piece was posted online the next day, but still nothing in the print edition.

After the pandemic started we immediately passed a $3.5 trillion rescue bill. Later we passed two more rescue bills, bringing the total to over $6 trillion. Was that responsible for the spike in inflation that began in 2021?

Yes and no. It was responsible for some of the inflation, but for a very specific reason: it kept consumer spending strong at a time when supply was constricted. Take a look at consumer spending during the pandemic vs. the Great Recession:

Following the Great Recession, nominal consumer spending grew slowly for many years thanks to inadequate stimulus. Conversely, consumer spending during and after the pandemic grew nicely, keeping the economy in good shape and helping millions of people avoid poverty and homelessness. So hooray for the COVID rescue packages!

There was only one problem:

We gave too much money to people who didn't need it: middle and upper-middle class folks who hadn't lost their jobs. The lower half of the income spectrum never had a lot of excess savings in the first place, and in any case they mostly spent it on things like food and rent, which had little effect on inflation. The upper half, by contrast, peaked at close to $2 trillion in excess savings. And since they already had money for food and rent, they mostly bought consumer goods and services that were constrained by supply. So inflation shot up.

This was a situation that screamed out for means testing. We could have easily cut payments to the upper half by a trillion dollars with no adverse effects on either the economy or the individuals themselves. And on the upside, we would have created less inflationary pressure.

Inflation is declining now as supply constraints disappear and even high-income consumers eat through their excess savings. But we probably could have avoided our inflation spike altogether if we had been more careful about who we gave rescue funding to. Giving it to the well-off did nothing but cause problems.

As foreshadowed yesterday, here is Charlie on one of our garden rocks, scanning the horizon for prey. And he found . . .

. . .a camera! Shooting him! But he stared it down and eventually the camera fled.

I accidentally came across this chart:

For the last couple of years, consumer expectations of inflation a year away exactly matches whatever the inflation rate is right now. In other words, it's completely useless.

Retail sales fell once again, as they've done steadily for the past year:

Sales were down 1.2% from February to March. That's an annualized rate of 14%.

But the Fed still thinks the economy is running too hot.