Month: June 2023

The group Moms for Liberty is holding its national convention this weekend. It was created in 2021, allegedly by three housewives who were political neophytes but finally decided one day that something had to be done about liberal threats to their kids' education. So they took a deep breath and started organizing, even though this was all new to them.

It's the oldest and hoariest story in Republican mythology. New "grassroots" groups are always the work of naive suburban women who got together over coffee one day and decided to give activism a whirl. But it's no more true this time around than it ever has been:

Moms for Liberty was incorporated in January 2021 by three Florida women: School board members Tina Descovich, Tiffany Justice, and Bridget Ziegler, the DeSantis-endorsed chair of the Sarasota County School Board and wife of Florida GOP Chairman Christian Ziegler.

The wife of Florida's Republican chairman. That sure sounds like someone who's a political sophisticate. And their funding hardly comes from masses of $5 donations:

Moms for Liberty reported $370,000 in revenue in its first year, including contributions of $100,000, $20,000, $15,000, $10,000, and $5,000....The group has said it’s still working on preparing more recent financial statements. Descovich recently told The Inquirer that “we definitely have some bigger individual donors who have come in over the last year to help us out.”

But how did they grow so fast? In less than 24 months they've swelled to 120,000 members in 285 chapters nationwide:

Like the tea party, Moms for Liberty has, in addition to grassroots donations it says have largely come through sales of its T-shirts, grown with the help of big-dollar conservative donors and ample airtime from right-wing media outlets....Moms for Liberty’s political action committee was the beneficiary of a $50,000 donation from Julie Fancelli, the Publix Super Markets heiress.

So this weekend, when you see cheering crowds, big-name speakers, and sharply-designed sets, this is why. It's because this has been a professional, highly planned, and deeply funded movement from the very start.

Here is Hilbert rolling around on the patio next to our new digiplexis plant, which Marian very much wanted me to get in the picture. It's the pinkish stalk in the top left.

Today the BLS released annual productivity figures for various industries and I got sort of interested in which industries had done best and worst over various periods of time. Here is annual productivity growth over the past three decades:

This is about what you'd expect. The wireless business has become fantastically more productive since 1987, as have software, travel, and wired communications. Media has done pretty well too, including cable, publishing, and radio.

Now here's productivity growth over the past three years:

This isn't wildly different, though amusement parks have done inexplicably well. Ditto for truck rental and restaurants. Most likely, these industries are bouncing back from poor performance during the pandemic.

Now here's just the past year:

Gambling! What a comeback! And some stodgy industries like warehousing and sewage have done well too. Conversely, software has had a bad year, and so has media. Even wireless drooped.

Note: There are no great lessons to be learned here. It's just raw data.

Another day, another Supreme Court opinion. In yet another unsurprising decision, the conservative majority ruled today that President Biden's student loan forgiveness program violates the law. The key argument is about the meaning of the president's authority under the HEROES Act to "waive or modify" the student loan program:

The Secretary’s plan has “modified” the cited provisions only in the same sense that “the French Revolution ‘modified’ the status of the French nobility”—it has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely....Labeling the Secretary’s plan a mere “modification” does not lessen its effect, which is in essence to allow the Secretary unfettered discretion to cancel student loans. It is “highly unlikely that Congress” authorized such a sweeping loan cancellation program “through such a subtle device as permission to ‘modify.’ ”

The Secretary responds that the Act authorizes him to “waive” legal provisions as well as modify them....Here, the Secretary does not identify any provision that he is actually waiving. No specific provision of the Education Act establishes an obligation on the part of student borrowers to pay back the Government. So as the Government concedes, “waiver”—as used in the HEROES Act—cannot refer to “waiv[ing] loan balances” or “waiving the obligation to repay” on the part of a borrower.

....The sharp debates generated by the Secretary’s extraordinary program stand in stark contrast to the unanimity with which Congress passed the HEROES Act. The dissent asks us to “[i]magine asking the enacting Congress: Can the Secretary use his powers to give borrowers more relief when an emergency has inflicted greater harm?” The dissent “can’t believe” the answer would be no. But imagine instead asking the enacting Congress a more pertinent question: “Can the Secretary use his powers to abolish $430 billion in student loans, completely canceling loan balances for 20 million borrowers, as a pandemic winds down to its end?” We can’t believe the answer would be yes. Congress did not unanimously pass the HEROES Act with such power in mind.

Elena Kagan's dissent takes the opposite view:

The Secretary has the linked power to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” applying to the student-loan programs. To start with the phrase after the verbs, “the word ‘any’ has an expansive meaning.” “Any” of the referenced provisions means, well, any of those provisions.

....In the HEROES Act, the dominant piece of context is that “modify” does not stand alone. It is one part of a couplet: “waive or modify.” The first verb, as discussed above, means eliminate—usually the most substantial kind of change. So the question becomes: Would Congress have given the Secretary power to wholly eliminate a requirement, as well as to relax it just a little bit, but nothing in between? The majority says yes. But the answer is no, because Congress would not have written so insane a law.

There is nothing deeper in either the majority opinion or the dissent. The question is whether "waive or modify" allows the president merely to change the conditions of student loans or whether it allows him to eliminate the loans altogether. The majority says one thing and the dissent says the other, and the truth is that neither provides any kind of persuasive argument. They simply assert their sides.

I don't find this ruling objectionable. Compare it to yesterday's affirmative action ruling. The key error in that decision was the finding that affirmative action is legal, but only for a temporary period. That's wholly invented. There is nothing in either the Constitution or in statute that even hints at the idea that affirmative action must be time limited. If affirmative action were flatly illegal, that would be one thing, and the majority should have made that case. But having accepted that it's not illegal, they have no basis for a mere opinion that they find it tiresome that it's gone on so long.

There's no such problem in today's case. There is simply a disagreement over the words "waive or modify"—a phrase with enough looseness that it can reasonably be interpreted multiple ways. For my money, I think the majority has the slightly better of the argument, but it's a close call. It could have gone either way.

We got nice inflation news today. The headline PCE inflation rate dropped to 1.5% while the core inflation rate finally showed some modest downward movement to 3.9%.

This is the annualized monthly rate. On a year-over-year basis, headline inflation fell to 3.8% while core inflation was stuck at 4.6%.

In related news, consumer spending was flat in May but basically stayed on its pre-pandemic trend:

Disposable personal income in May rose at an annualized rate of 3.8%:

The latest homeless counts were released today for Los Angeles, and it just doesn't get any better. The total number of homeless jumped 9% to 75,000 people, and the share with no shelter stayed steady at 73%:

About 55,000 people live on the streets in Los Angeles County. The other 20,000 homeless live in emergency shelters or transitional housing of some kind.

I was noodling around on the KFF site this morning and came across their most recent tracking poll about Obamacare. I was surprised to see how popular it's become:

Obamacare has been through a lot: passage by a single vote, endless attempts to repeal it, and multiple Supreme Court challenges that nearly cratered it. Somehow, though, it's not only survived but been expanded and improved over the years.

Today it's no longer an object of derision. It may not quite be in the ranks of beloved social programs, but 15 million people rely on it and a solid 60% of the country thinks it's a good thing. It took a little patience, but it's now—finally—a permanent and popular part of the social welfare landscape.

Wisteria hanging from a covered walkway at the Huntington Library.

A couple of months ago it looked like GDP growth had slowed down a lot, clocking in at an anemic 1.1% in the first quarter. Then it was revised upward to 1.3%. Then, today, it was revised upward yet again:

BEA now says that Q1 growth was 2.0%. That's not barnburning, but it's respectable.

GDI was also revised upward from -2.3% to -1.8%. The average of GDP and GDI, which in some circles is considered a more accurate measure of true growth, was revised up from -0.5% to +0.1%. I don't know if this is really a better measure of growth, but it does produce a different picture than GDP alone:

Average GDP growth over the past five quarters is 1.1%. Average GDP/GDI growth is 0.3%. It's quite something not to know for sure which is really correct.

In a ruling that surprised precisely no one, the Supreme Court killed off affirmative action in university admissions today:

Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it. And the Equal Protection Clause, we have accordingly held, applies “without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality”—it is “universal in [its] application.”

....The case Grutter v. Bollinger...expressed marked discomfort with the use of race in college admissions....To manage these concerns, Grutter imposed one final limit on race-based admissions programs. At some point, the Court held, they must end. This requirement was critical, and Grutter emphasized it repeatedly....The importance of an end point was not just a matter of repetition. It was the reason the Court was willing to dispense temporarily with the Constitution’s unambiguous guarantee of equal protection.

....Harvard concedes that its race-based admissions program has no end point. And it acknowledges that the way it thinks about the use of race in its admissions process “is the same now as it was” nearly 50 years ago....In short, there is no reason to believe that respondents will—even acting in good faith—comply with the Equal Protection Clause any time soon.

The dissent [defends] a judiciary that picks winners and losers based on the color of their skin. While the dissent would certainly not permit university programs that discriminated against black and Latino applicants, it is perfectly willing to let the programs here continue. In its view, this Court is supposed to tell state actors when they have picked the right races to benefit. Separate but equal is “inherently unequal,” said Brown. It depends, says the dissent.

The opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, a longtime foe of affirmative action, who was joined by all the Court's conservatives and opposed by all its liberals. It's a remarkably short and simple ruling, saying little more than (a) the state must be race-blind in all things, and (b) therefore affirmative action—which might be tolerated temporarily due to the extraordinary circumstances of American history—has to end at some time. And this is finally the time. There's really nothing more to it.