Month: August 2023

Here it is compared to the previous three presidents:¹

He's right on track.

¹As usual, I've left off George W. Bush because of the huge bump he got from 9/11. It makes normal comparisons useless during the first term of his presidency.

From Politico:

A looming child care funding crisis threatens Biden’s economic recovery

Nearly $24 billion in federal aid for daycare centers and preschools is slated to run out Sept. 30, roiling a child care system that has underpinned the White House’s efforts to stabilize the broader economy and get people back to work.

....Daycare and preschool prices remain stubbornly high....Those costs — which typically run families more than $10,000 a year on average — are now likely to creep higher as child care programs compensate for the drop-off in federal aid, hitting American parents already fixated on the increase in everyday expenses. One projection widely circulated among Democrats estimates the funding expiration could boot as many as 3 million children from their programs, costing families up to $9 billion in total annual earnings.

....“It’s going to be really unfortunate timing,” said Whitney Pesek, director of federal child care policy at the National Women’s Law Center. “Child care prices are going to be going up heading into the 2024 election, when everyone’s running on the economy.”

This stuff annoys me. The whole point of this federal aid was to help out child care centers that were in danger of going out of business during the pandemic. That's it. Now the pandemic is over and parents have sent their kids back to day care:

Some things are meant to be permanent forms of social welfare, like food stamps or Medicaid. But loans and grants to child care centers hit by a natural disaster aren't, and there's no reason to claim that this is a uniquely "bad time" to end it. The pandemic is over, kids are back, parents are working, the cost of child care is down compared to the start of the pandemic, and the economy is in good shape. Child care centers are in pretty much the same position they were in three years ago, so there's no reason at all to think that child care costs will suddenly spurt upward. What could possibly be a better time?

Ramesh Ponnuru points to a new piece by Lyman Stone that says the decline of religion in America is mostly among the young. In fact:

Most of the decline in religion is actually among children, and virtually all of it among people under age 22.

This is crazy. Stone presents a whole bunch of charts that are limited to teens but ignores the easiest source of data around: the General Social Survey, which has asked about religious beliefs since 1972 and breaks everything down by age. Then, when he does finally get around to the GSS, he shows only the data for belief in God. But here's the growth of people saying they have "no religion." Nothing much happened in the '70s and '80s, but then secularization took off:

In absolute numbers, young people have always been less religious than older people. In 2021 twice as many young people declared no religion as did the 65+ age group. But in 1994 it was nearly five times as many. Secularization has grown far more among the old than the young.

Here is church attendance:

Church attendance has been declining ever since 1972. In this case secularization has grown most strongly among the middle-aged, and there's not a big difference between young and old. The number of people who never go to church has tripled or more among every age group.

Stone's biggest point is that secularization starts in childhood. I imagine this is more or less true, but I can't say the data really backs it up. The number of older adults who are non-religious has gone up about 5x since 1994, and these are people whose childhoods were in the '50 and '60s—or even earlier. This is long before any countercultural secularization was in play. An awful lot of the decline in religion has happened among full-grown adults.

Sunrise in the desert, near the spot where I set up for astrophotography.

Joe Biden's press secretary says he is "constantly working every day to get things done." National Review's Charles Cooke isn't buying it:

This line reflects unmitigated contempt for her audience — which, given KJP’s job, is the entire American public. She knows what she’s saying isn’t true. And she knows that everyone knows that what she’s saying isn’t true. 77 percent of Americans — including 69 percent of Democrats — believe that Joe Biden is “too old to be effective for four more years.” They believe that because they can see it. Of course Biden is not hard to keep up with. Of course Biden is not constantly working every day. He’s barely alive. Who, exactly, are these lies supposed to move?

The level of Cooke's invective is both astounding and offensive. It's one thing to say that Biden is 80 years old and not exactly bouncing around on a trapeze all day. Nor does he have a youngster's silver tongue. But he's plainly cogent and plainly busy, as conservatives implicitly acknowledge all the time when they complain about his nearly daily flood of legislative proposals, executive orders, and progressive announcements of one sort or another. Hell, the man is so busy doing stuff they hate that House Republicans want to impeach him.

Here is an excerpt from Franklin Foer's book about Biden's first two years in office. The subject is former ambassador to Afghanistan John Bass, who led the evacuation effort when we withdrew:

Biden would shower Bass with ideas to evacuate more people. “The president’s instinct was to throw himself into the intricacies of troubleshooting,” Foer writes. “‘Why don’t we have them meet in parking lots? Can’t we leave the airport and pick them up?’ Bass would kick around Biden’s proposed solutions with colleagues to determine their plausibility, which was usually low. Still, he appreciated Biden applying pressure, making sure that he didn’t overlook the obvious.”

I get it. Politics ain't beanbag, and conservatives will use whatever's at hand to gain an advantage. But I haven't seen or heard one single report from inside the White House about Biden not being able to keep up with a normal presidential schedule. In fact, Biden runs just about the most buttoned-up White House in recent memory.

We don't need a hyperactive president. We just need one who has good judgment and stays on top of things. Biden easily qualifies on both counts.

For your amusement here are some details about consumer spending in the second quarter of the year. This chart shows the 15 biggest gainers and losers compared to the first quarter:

We started buying eggs again! Sports and air transportation were up considerably too. The biggest loser, for some reason, was audio discs and downloads. Day care, clothing, and used cars were also down.

NOTE: I ignored some obscure stuff like sales commissions and auto leases in favor of ordinary categories that everyone has heard of. As always, click the chart to see a bigger version.

Brian Merchant defends the Luddites:

They were not opposed to progress, and certainly not to technology; most were skilled technicians themselves, who spent their days working on machines at home or in small shops. It is true that the Luddites hammered certain machines to pieces, but it wasn’t technology itself they were protesting — it was the bosses that were using those machines to cut their pay and shepherd them into factories.

That sure seems like a distinction without a difference to me. Merchant is saying that the Luddites didn't oppose new technology, they merely opposed other people using new technology in ways they disliked. OK.

It turns out this is all in service of defending modern writers who are outraged because ChatGPT has been trained on their books:

The reason that, 200 years later, so many creative workers are angry and unnerved by AI is not that they fear it will become so good, so powerful that they may as well up and quit writing, drawing, or acting. It’s that, like the Luddites, they are painfully aware how bosses will use AI against them. To most working authors (and artists, screenwriters, illustrators, and so on) the fear over AI is not philosophical; it is economic, and it is existential.

The only way that bosses can use AI against writers is if AI, in fact, becomes so good and so powerful that it performs as well as humans. There's really no difference here.

In any case, the writers are supposedly put out by the fact that ChatGPT and similar apps have been trained on their copyrighted works. But so what? Copyright is just what it sounds like: it prevents you from copying a work and selling it without permission. It doesn't prevent you from reading a book and reviewing it, even if you haven't purchased it. Likewise, it doesn't prevent either a human or a computer from ingesting a work in order to index it or summarize it or do research with it.

ChatGPT cannot spit out a copy of a book upon demand. Or, if it can, it can be legally enjoined from doing so. But merely reading a book in order to get better at its job? There's nothing either wrong or illegal about that.

Here's the latest from Russia:

Russia has got to be the whiniest warmonger in history. They are constantly "accusing" Ukraine of one thing or another, as if it were somehow unfair that they're fighting back.

It's a war, Vladimir, and you started it. Don't try to act offended because Ukraine is trying to win.

Consumer spending accelerated to an annualized growth rate of 7.7% in July:

Spending growth was up 3.0% from a year ago. This is all good news for soft landing fans, since it suggests that consumer spending remains healthy even as the rest of the economy slows a bit.

I've mentioned before that consumer spending almost never goes down, even during recessions, so don't take this news too seriously. If we do end up entering a recession, spending is likely to stay strong right up until the minute growth turns down.

For the second month in a row, PCE inflation stayed below 3%:

Both core and headline PCE came in at 2.6% on a month-over-month basis. On a year-over-year basis, headline PCE was 3.3% and core inflation was 4.2%.

Core PCE, which is the Fed's favored measure, shows every sign of being well under 3% on a steady basis. It's at 2.9% over the past three months. If this holds up, the Fed's inflation fighting job is done.

POSTSCRIPT: I notice that our nation's news media barely even reported this. When inflation is up, it's big news. When it's down they can hardly be bothered to take notice.