Month: July 2023

The New York Post cherry picks a few quotes today to imply that Disney CEO Bob Iger isn't happy about going to battle with Ron DeSantis in Florida:

“The last thing I want is for the company to be drawn into any culture wars,” he told CNBC of Disney’s First Amendment case against DeSantis that was filed in April, which has since escalated into a row of warring lawsuits.

“I’m not sure that was handled very well,” Iger told CNBC of Disney’s response to DeSantis’ hotly-debated legislation that has been branded by critics as “Don’t Say Gay,” which was signed into law in March of 2022.

Over at National Review, Brendan Michael Dougherty takes it a step or three further:

Disney CEO: DeSantis Beat Us

What we should not be hearing after today are arguments that Disney won the battle with DeSantis. Disney is telling us, plain as day: This fight was a loss and should never have been fought at all.

I wouldn't have given this another thought if I hadn't run into a Politico headline and story about Iger's interview:

Disney CEO responds to DeSantis: ‘Preposterous’ that company is sexualizing kids

Disney CEO Bob Iger hit back at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday for starting a highly dramatized public fight against the entertainment giant....He also gave a full-throated endorsement of Disney’s ongoing lawsuit against the Florida governor, in which the California-based company accuses DeSantis of weaponizing his political power.

....“It’s concerning to me that anyone would encourage a level of intolerance or even hate that frankly could even become dangerous action. The notion that Disney is in any way sexualizing children, quite frankly, is preposterous and inaccurate,” Iger added.

....“Frankly, the company was within its right — even though I’m not sure it was handled very well — was within its right to speak up on an issue, constitutionally protected right of free speech,” Iger said Thursday. “To retaliate against the company in a way that would be harmful to the business was not something we could sit back and tolerate.”

I realize that this should probably be filed under "Who cares?" but for some reason it struck me as an especially egregious example of the intense desire so many people have to misrepresent things even when they're easily checkable. Hell, the Iger interview was on CNBC. Lots of people saw it, and it's obvious that Iger wasn't backing down, wasn't saying Disney had lost, and wasn't claiming they never should have fought back. He was saying exactly the opposite. What's the point of pretending otherwise?

The top photo shows the sun setting over a Marine Corps construction project on the beach at Camp Pendleton. The project is a bunch of concrete boxes, and I don't know what they're for. Urban warfare exercises?

The bottom photo is the same scene but from a different angle. The big cloud on the left is the famous Southern California marine layer rolling in. Within a couple of minutes it had made its way to me and I was completely socked in.

In the New York Times today, Laura Beamer and Marshall Steinbaum write about the catastrophe of America's student loan epidemic:

America’s Student Loans Were Never Going to Be Repaid

In recent years, many Americans with student loans weren’t making enough money to pay even the accumulating interest on their debt, let alone make progress on the principal....We predict that most of the outstanding balances — not to mention the roughly $100 billion in new loans issued every year — won’t ever be repaid.

This whole piece is full of weird, mismatched statistics that are designed more to confuse than enlighten—always a sure tip-off that something is fishy. So here are two super-simple pieces of data about student loans. The first contains estimates from the Education Data Initiative:

The vast majority of students with loans attend public universities. On average, it takes them 4-5 years to pay off their loans for an AA or bachelor's degree. A master's degree takes longer. There is no sign here that paying off a student loan is some kind of impossible task.

The second chart comes from the New York Fed, which tracks delinquency rates for student loans. I've inverted that to show how many students remain current on their repayment schedule:

Transition into delinquency has risen slightly over the past two decades to 9%, which means that 91% of borrowers remain current. Again, this is not a sign that student loans are impossible to pay off.

As Beamer and Steinbaum acknowledge, repayment varies considerably between various groups. The poorest obviously have the hardest time. Those who take out loans to get worthless "degrees" from for-profit trade schools are often in bad shape. And students who take out loans but then never finish school—and therefore lack the extra income they hoped for from a college degree—have difficulties too.

All that said, student loans on average are burdensome but not catastrophic for most people. There are some targeted actions we could and probably should take for the worst off, but broadly speaking, student loans just don't deserve the panic they often provoke.

It's been a long time coming, but the FDA has finally approved an oral contraceptive you can get without a prescription. The US is now one of the dozens of countries that either formally or informally allow women to buy contraceptives over the counter:

The reason for approving OTC contraceptives is simple. First, they're safe. Second, contraceptives are more likely to get used if women don't have to get them routinely re-prescribed:

An El Paso study showed that women were less likely to stop using contraceptives if they could buy them over the counter. A California study showed that both unplanned pregnancies and abortions went down significantly among women given a 1-year supply of contraceptives instead of continual 1-month supplies.

The particular contraceptive approved today is called Opill, and will be available next year. Hopefully others will follow.

I'll confess that even I have a bit of inflation fatigue. But how about one more round? Today the BLS presents us with the latest figures for the Producer Price Index, which is basically wholesale prices. Here it is through June:

Although the overall PPI jumped a bit in June, it has been absolutely flat over the past year. It shows zero inflation in producer prices since last June. (Goods are down 4.4% over the past year. Services are up 2.3%.)

Since wholesale prices eventually feed into consumer prices, the plunge in the PPI has been leading the way for the drop in the CPI. It appears to still be on its way down, so it will almost certainly push even further declines in the CPI over the rest of the year.

Here is the full text of the ill-fated Equal Rights Amendment:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven ten years from the date of its submission by the Congress:

"ARTICLE —

"Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

"Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

"Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification."

The ERA was passed in 1972 and needed ratification from 38 states before its 10-year deadline expired. It got only 35. However, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Representative Cori Bush of Missouri have proposed a three-step strategy to declare that the ERA has, in fact, passed already and only needs to be recognized. It goes like this:

1. The 10-year deadline is part of the preamble, not the actual text of the Amendment, so it doesn't count.
2. During the Trump administration three more states ratified the ERA: Illinois, Nevada, and Virginia. That brings the tally to 38.
3. Six states have repealed their ratification, but there's no constitutional mechanism for doing that. Once ratified, always ratified.

This means that the required 38 states have legally ratified the ERA and the national archivist merely needs to announce it. Done and done.

But can it work? Gillibrand plans to introduce a joint resolution that codifies her theory, but Republicans will never support it:

Ms. Gillibrand conceded that she did not think Republicans would ever support the amendment, “largely because the pro-life movement has co-opted this argument,” she said. She said her hope was to compel Mr. Biden to call on the archivist to take action, or to change the filibuster rules in the Senate so that civil rights measures like the amendment would need only a simple majority — not 60 votes — to move forward.

This is doomed. Biden won't act unilaterally; the Senate won't pass an enabling resolution; and no court would back Gillibrand's plan.

“This is a political rather than a legal struggle,” said Laurence Tribe, the constitutional scholar and professor emeritus at Harvard Law School. “It would succeed only in a different environment than we have. It’s not going to pass. The real question is what political message is being sent. In a political environment like this, you throw at the wall whatever you can.”

If Gillibrand were a Republican making a weird new legal argument for something like, say, overturning the 25th Amendment as a Deep State coup, there's a tolerable chance the Supreme Court would stroke its collective chin, make up some shiny new doctrine, and rule in favor. But a Democrat with a weird new legal theory for a liberal cause? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Inflation is down. But there are doubters about the cause:

All it took for inflation to be transitory was 500bps of rate hikes and 7% mortgage rates.

— Conor Sen (@conorsen) July 12, 2023

Oh come on. This really doesn't bear much scrutiny. Here's inflation:

Even if you don't believe me when I say that it takes a year for interest rates to work through the economy and affect inflation—which to this day remains the general consensus of economists—you can't possibly believe that a quarter-point hike in March 2022 caused inflation to start declining in June. Inflation started coming down on its own, not because of anything the Fed did.

As for housing:

Mortgage rates did indeed skyrocket last year, but their effect on the housing market was surprisingly minimal. Housing under construction went up. From peak to trough, housing prices went down only 5%. The total value of residential construction went down about $100 billion—far too little to have much macroeconomic effect—and is still $200 billion above its pre-pandemic level.

Inflation went up mainly because of pandemic supply shocks and partly because we overdid federal stimulus a bit. There were also some temporary factors, like the Ukraine war and crop problems. When those subsided, so did inflation. The Fed has had almost nothing to do with it.

According to Rolling Stone, Rupert Murdoch is wavering in his support for Ron DeSantis:

In recent weeks, the Murdochs have grown increasingly displeased with the DeSantis campaign’s perceived stumbles, lackluster polling, and inability to swiftly dethrone Trump....According to two of the sources, Murdoch has privately winced at DeSantis’ nonstop cultural-grievance strategy, arguing that it is being executed sloppily.

Let me get this straight. Murdoch isn't especially concerned about DeSantis's ceaseless and repellent pandering to haters and the ignorant. He's only concerned that DeSantis isn't doing it very well.

Good to clear that up.

I don't know for sure how accurate this is, but it's certainly intriguing:

This comes from David Rozado, who says he used ChatGPT to "automatically label a longitudinal sample of 1.7 million headlines from 12 popular U.S. news media outlets."

If he's right, there was a big surge in pessimistic headlines in the late '60s and again around 2001, all against a backdrop of a steady increase ever since 1950. The two surges coincide with Vietnam and 9/11, but they never faded out. Headlines just reached a new level of pessimism and then kept increasing.

I'll spare you the long monologue, but I'm persistently befuddled about how pessimistic and angry and outraged so many people are these days. The headlines are just a symptom. My view is that anything even close to a clear look at things suggests that we are kicking ass these days. This isn't to say there are no problems—of course there are. There always are. We have climate change, COVID-19, declining life expectancy among the poor, and a war in Ukraine.

But the United States is the most powerful and dynamic country on earth, and it isn't even close. Our future is the brightest on the planet. Here in the US, economic growth is strong; incomes over time are up; poverty is down; social factors of all kinds are positive; democracy is strong despite the best efforts of Donald Trump and the MAGAnauts; fear of social media has almost no foundation in fact; technology is delivering marvels on practically a daily basis; crime is subdued; jobs are plentiful; and entrepreneurship is up.

But you sure wouldn't know it from our political discourse, which features two parties and a willing media that routinely portray every small setback as evidence the end times are nigh. It's maddening.

I've never liked having things in my ears, so on a whim I took advantage of Prime Days to buy a wireless "headphone" that fits around the back of your neck, curls over your ears, and produces sound via bone conduction.

They're great! The sound is good,¹ the stereo separation is excellent, and they fit snugly. If you too have never been comfortable with stuffing earbuds into your ears, I highly recommend them.

¹By ordinary standards, that is. I won't pretend to know how they stack up if you're an audiophile who demands only the best.