Month: April 2023

The Washington Post reports that consumers are still feeling battered by inflation:

Although inflation has slowly cooled from last summer’s highs, price pressures continue to feel like an uphill battle for consumers, politicians and policymakers alike. Many say recent strides have been too spotty to offer much relief, even as annual price growth has slowed from 9.1 percent to 5 percent.

It's actually better than that. Since June of last year the price level has risen 2.4%. That's a 3.2% annual rate. For the average person, this is indistinguishable from the "normal" rate of 2%.

So why does inflation still seem so troublesome? The answer is simple: that 3.2% figure is a combination of 7.2% for food and 2.6% for everything else. This increase in the supermarket, where shoppers are really paying attention, overwhelms everything else.

Added to that is our preoccupation with whatever individual food happens to be in shortest supply. Right now the big story is eggs, and news outlets are still running stories about the egg crisis even though the price of eggs has fallen for the past two months:

Still, the price of eggs is up by a third over the past year, and that has a bigger impact on most people's perceptions than a blog post telling them that overall inflation has been running at 3.2% for the past nine months.

I forgot to include supercore inflation in this morning's post. Here is CPI excluding food, energy, and shelter:

BLS released its March inflation numbers today, and they ticked down nicely from February:

Core inflation is still stubbornly high, which BLS attributes largely to increases in the shelter index. This is fairly artificial, and should decrease substantially once their measure of shelter inflation catches up to the current day.

(And in case you care, year-over-year inflation was 5.0% for the headline rate and 5.6% for the core rate.)

Blue slips are back in the news after the Biden administration thought it had a consensus candidate for a judgeship in Mississippi, only for it to be blocked at the last minute by a Republican senator. Let's listen in:

Republicans abandoned the blue-slip process for appeals court judges after gaining control of the Senate in 2015, allowing them to rapidly confirm scores of Donald J. Trump’s judicial nominees over Democratic objections. But the practice was retained for district court judges, and Mr. Durbin has been reluctant to jettison it, fearing Republicans would retaliate by bringing the confirmation process to a standstill.

“You always have to ask, ‘What would they do in response?’” Mr. Durbin said in an interview. “There are an infinite array of possibilities to slow down the United States Senate. Anyone can stop the train for any reason.”

Let me get this straight. Republicans abandoned blue slips completely for appellate judges when Trump was president and then proceeded to fill the circuit courts with right-wing picks. Nothing happened.

Today, Dick Durbin is reluctant to abandon blue slips for one district court judgeship because Republicans might retaliate: "There are an infinite array of possibilities to slow down the United States Senate," he explains.

Out of that infinite array, did Democrats use any of them to slow down the tsunami of Trump judges? Why not? Does this array even exist? And why do Democrats even care about slowing down the Senate since Republicans control the House and no business is going to be transacted anyway?

Republicans have been playing games with blue slips for decades and Democrats have never retaliated, apparently in hopes that Republicans will someday come to their senses and start behaving decently. What will it take to finally disabuse them of that notion?

Two guys hanging out on La Brea Ave. in Los Angeles. Don't forget to file your taxes this week!

It's well documented that schoolchildren lost a significant amount of learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. A new NBER study attempts to figure out how much of that they made up in 2022. Their metric is the percentage of students who scored "proficient" on state tests. Here are the results for math:

Of the 20 states in the study, Mississippi made the strongest recovery. Their pass rate is now close to what it was before COVID. Minnesota was the worst. However, every state showed at least some recovery. The same is not true of reading:

Two states, South Carolina and Mississippi, have made up all their losses and now have a higher pass rate than before COVID. However, five states continued to decline. Massachusetts went from a 52% pass rate to 45% during COVID and then dropped 41% in 2022.

The size of the difference between states is remarkable. But this chart suggests it might be easy to explain:

This is a binned scatterplot done at the district level (not the state level). The conclusion is plain: the bigger the loss in 2021, the bigger the gain in 2022. However, the correlation is extremely tight, which makes me a little suspicious—especially when we see no such thing at the state level:

There's only the slightest correlation between gains and losses at the state level, which is where education policy is set. So this probably doesn't explain much. Furthermore, the study's authors dug into a bunch of other possible explanations for the wide variance in state results, but none of them panned out. For now, it's a mystery.

For some reason I decided to torture myself and read yesterday's New York Times focus group with twelve people in their 70s and 80s. Here's my favorite part:

Earlier, someone mentioned Dianne Feinstein, the senator from California, who has served for nearly 30 years. She just announced she’d be retiring from the Senate. Does anyone have a strong view one way or another about that decision?

Eugene, 80, Calif., white, Republican, retired
She should have done it two election cycles ago.

Why do you think so?

It was three election cycles ago that we voted $3 billion to provide for reservoirs and water for the state. That remains unspent.

So it’s about effectiveness in office, Eugene?

Oh, yes.

It's true that in 2014 we voted to spend a bunch of money on water projects. It's also true that these projects take a long time to approve and build. Most of them aren't scheduled to become operational until the end of the decade.

Maybe that sucks, or maybe it's just business as usual. Either way, though, Dianne Feinstein is a US Senator and has nothing to with it. But Eugene is mad at her anyway.

Last night the conversation at dinner somehow turned to the subject of education and the South. No conclusions were reached except for a vague agreement that Southern states didn't spend a lot on education and had generally poor outcomes.

But is that true? Naturally I decided to check. My metric is 8th grade reading scores on the NAEP because (a) 12th grade scores are old, sparse, and cover only a few states, and (b) reading scores are a better reflection of general education than math scores. Here are the results separately for Black and white students:

All the usual statistical caveats apply here, and this should hardly be taken as the final word. However, one possible confounder that I checked out specifically was private school enrollment, which turned out to be about the same in the South as everywhere else.

The perhaps surprising result of all this is that, relative to other states, six Southern states are above average when it comes to Black scores. Only three are above average when it comes to white scores. I'm not quite sure what to conclude from this.

In any case, when you look at the results for all students it turns out that Southern states are unexceptional. As a group, their reading scores are slightly below average (256 vs. 259, a gap of about one-third of a grade level), but nothing more than that. Among Black children, the average score for Southern states is very slightly above the US average (241 vs. 240).

Over at National Review, Philip Klein takes in the news that payments on the federal debt have gone up thanks to higher interest rates. Along the way he says:

Under President Biden, massive spending has fueled not only high deficits but also inflation.

Let's take a look!

It looks to me like both Biden and Mitch McConnell spent a big slug of money,¹ and of course they did so for a reason: COVID-19. As the COVID emergency has waned, so has federal spending, which is now back to its longtime trend.

So let's put a cap on the nonsense, OK? If high spending is indeed responsible for our inflation spike, it's as much the responsibility of McConnell as Biden. But if a year of inflation is the price of a spending policy that kept the United States on the path of growth and full employment, it was worth it. As Paul Krugman points out today, COVID emergency spending is the reason that employment took only 37 months to recover compared to the 144 months it took to recover from the Great Recession:

This looks like a pretty good tradeoff to me. It's something to be proud of, not ashamed of.

¹Normally I would have said "Biden and Donald Trump," but I couldn't bring myself to pretend that Trump played any role in this. He was too busy at the time figuring out ways to make sure he didn't take the blame for the pandemic.