Month: July 2023

Social Security has a modest funding shortfall. If nothing is done, benefits will have to be cut by a quarter in 2033 or thereabouts.

Several Republican candidates for president think this is just fine as long as we cut only the benefits of young people. That's kind of cynical, but politics ain't beanbag. If young people have to be thrown under the bus, well, that's why God gave us buses.

But I'd like to remind you that Social Security can be fixed for everyone for all time with only two small changes:

• Increase the payroll tax cap so that 90% of income is taxed, as intended by the 1977 reform act. In practice, this would raise the cap from its current $160,000 to include income up to about $300,000.
• Increase the payroll tax from 6.2% to 7.4%.

That's it. That's all it takes to fix Social Security forever and meet the promises we've made to workers of every generation. It's not hard and not painful.

Just sayin':

This might be Ron DeSantis's most embarrassing pander yet:

We’ve kneecapped ESG in Florida.

So I’m calling for an investigation into AB InBev’s actions regarding their Bud Light marketing campaign and falling stock prices.

All options are on the table and woke corporations that put ideology ahead of returns should be on notice. pic.twitter.com/B3frLY4f30

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) July 21, 2023

Uh huh. Here is InBev's stock price over the past five years:

InBev stock dropped by half in 2020 and the state of Florida was unconcerned.

It dropped by a quarter in 2021 and the state of Florida was unconcerned.

It dropped by a third in 2022 and the state of Florida was unconcerned.

Then, in the month of April 2023, following the Dylan Mulvaney boycott, it dropped 2.4% and is currently trading at almost exactly its value on January 1. And yet suddenly the state of Florida is worried about its legal obligation to "prudently manage the funds of Florida's hardworking enforcement officers, teachers, firefighters, and first responders."

Anheuser-Busch is doing fine. Go back to your cave, Ron.

Here is Charlie blissing out as Hilbert licks his head. Usually this presages an attack from Hilbert, but not this time. He just felt like licking someone.

It's funny that SNAP (food stamps) and WIC (Women Infants and Children) grow and shrink differently over time. SNAP responds to the economy, growing during recessions when it's needed most and then falling when the economy improves and it's needed less. It declined during the expansion of the aughts but then increased by nearly 20% during the pandemic.

WIC, by contrast, doesn't respond to the economy at all. It grew steadily through 2009 and has declined ever since. It didn't grow during the Great Recession and didn't even grow during the pandemic years. It's now 30% smaller than it was in 2010.

Any explanations for this? Does it have something to do with the way these two programs are funded?

Threads may have signed up 100 million users in its first week, but that doesn't mean 100 million people are actually using it:

Generally speaking, everyone seems to agree that lack of features is the main reason for the drop in engagement. It's certainly the reason I haven't signed up in the first place. Threads is pretty useless to me until they release a browser client, since I'm not going to fat-finger my way through a phone interface. Beyond that, I have little interest in an app that decides for itself which posts to show me. A bare minimum requirement is that I can follow whoever I want.

I can only assume that lots of people agree about the lack of critical features. Either that or they find Threads terminally boring. I'm not sure which would be worse.

The town of Burney in northern California has suffered a recent bout of vomiting and stomach illness due to an outbreak of e. coli in the water supply. The LA Times fills us in:

Everyone is struggling to get through their days without potable water as the local water district works to treat the source of the problem. Restaurants that rely on tourists have shut their doors.

It is yet another example of the vulnerability of rural California’s water systems. Many of the state’s failing water systems are in the Central Valley, where water is drawn from wells that are contaminated with nitrates, or that have run dry because of years of drought and overpumping of groundwater.

According to the CDC, here is how California's water systems have fared over the past half century:

Until Burney, there hasn't been a single waterborne disease outbreak in California since 2017. How hard is it to look this up and realize that California's water systems apparently aren't all that vulnerable after all?

This is downtown Los Angeles at night viewed from Angeles Crest Highway. City Hall is off to the left. There's a thin marine layer settling in south of downtown, with the lights of Long Beach behind it and then yet another marine layer over the ocean.

Last night I posted a chart showing the relationship between interest rate hikes and subsequent changes in the unemployment rate. I got some pushback because the data was so noisy it seemed like the relationship was made up. To clarify things, here's a smoothed version of the chart that uses rolling 6-month averages:

Apologies for how busy this chart is. The blue line shows every single time long-term interest rates have been pushed up by two percentage points or very close to it. There are six instances, and in one of them (1995) nothing happened. In four of them unemployment started to increase 6-18 months later. The final one happened earlier this year.

There's no cherry picking and no noise. Unemployment and recession follow interest rate hikes by about a year. I expect the same thing to happen this time.

Temecula, California, is not MAGA country. It's wine country, sort of rural but not very, and is generally moderately Republican. Donald Trump won 53% of the vote in 2020.

And yet, Temecula is currently ground zero for a furious backlash against a fifth-grade history textbook because it includes optional supplementary material that mentions gay activist Harvey Milk, who was assassinated in 1978. This has prompted spittle-flecked fury among ultra-conservative school board members against both the textbook and Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is forcing them to use it:

They painted Newsom — who plans to send textbooks that reference Milk to Temecula students in defiance of the board — as a “tyrant” who “forces his rule” upon a district he knows nothing about. They called lessons about LGBTQ+ history “pornographic” and “obscene.”

....Conservative school board President Joseph Komrosky, who called Milk a “pedophile” and has been publicly feuding with Newsom over the issue, asked sheriff deputies on Tuesday to remove a teacher from the meeting after she called conservative board member Danny Gonzalez a “homophobe.”

Without evidence, Gonzalez said that proposed instruction would promote pedophilia and said he opposed teaching about the gay liberation movement that began in the 1960s because it’s “not appropriate to discuss sexuality.”

As I mentioned the other day, this is what happens when conservatives take control of school boards. It's always the extremist crackpots who end up in charge, pushing insane conspiracy theories about "obscene" content and "pedophiles" being foisted on our children.

In reality, this is just some optional material about gay rights, something that none of the initial reviewers even bothered mentioning, let alone objected to. As for the kids themselves, I doubt they're fazed by this stuff even slightly. They probably know all about it already.