Cats, charts, and politics
The BLS reports today that it has revised its employment figures for the past year. Between March 2022 and March 2023 we produced 300,000 fewer jobs than we originally estimated. This is about 0.2% of all jobs, which isn't a lot. Here's what it looks like:
Meh. The biggest loser was transportation and warehousing, which was revised downward by 2.2%
The Wall Street Journal reports that we have 97 fewer nursing homes than we did last year. What struck me about this number was how small it was. Not 97 thousand or 97 million. Just 97. That's not very much, is it?
Naturally I was curious about this, but it turns out there's not much data available about long-term care in general. The CDC does some tracking, but its most recent data is from 2018. Sometimes them's the breaks, though, so here's the overall change in the biggest categories of long-term care between 2014 and 2018:
Generally speaking, my instincts were right: There were 15,600 nursing homes in 2018 serving 1.3 million people. A loss of 100 nursing homes (serving about 10,000 people) is indeed a very small number—a little over half a percent.
What's more, this didn't represent a drop in long-term care so much as a reconfiguration. Other options increased, and the overall total was up by 250,000.
However, during this same period the population of people over age 75 increased by 2.1 million That's a lot more than 250,000.
So although the drop in nursing care facilities is probably not significant, especially with the growing trend toward home health care, the fact that long-term care options overall are growing a lot more slowly than the population means that facilities for taking care of our parents are being stretched thin. During the 2014-18 period, long-term care lagged behind population growth by nearly two million slots and I wouldn't be surprised if the same were true for the next four years. It's no wonder that finding long-term care has become so excruciating.
The House Freedom Caucus has issued its demands for the upcoming FY24 budget year:
We remain committed to restoring the true FY 2022 topline spending level of $1.471 trillion without the use of gimmicks or reallocated rescissions to return the bureaucracy to its pre-COVID size while allowing for adequate defense funding.
Right off the top, I confess that I'm confused by this number. It refers solely to discretionary spending—which excludes Social Security, Medicare, and other programs that are automatically funded—but every place I look has a different figure for discretionary spending. The OMB, for example, says that discretionary budget authority for FY22 was $1.788 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office says $1.661 trillion. HFC says $1.471 trillion. And all of these are different from actual outlays.
Whatever. But even if we accept the $1.471 trillion number, keeping it at no growth produces an FY24 budget cap of $1.63 trillion after accounting for inflation. This means we have three different numbers in play:
So what's the deal here? It's no surprise that the HFC doesn't accept the debt ceiling cap since they were mad about that from the beginning. But do they not believe in inflation? It's a real thing, not some kind of partisan flim flam. The Senate is working off the debt ceiling number, which is really and truly a cut from FY22 levels. Why is the HFC opposed to this?
Plus there's this:
These numbers are all from the Congressional Budget Office, so the comparison across time is apples to apples. It's shown as a percentage of GDP, since that's the normal way of presenting budget numbers. And I charted it back to 2000 so you can see I'm not cherry picking anything.
Bottom line: the HFC has nothing to complain about. Discretionary spending in 2023 is already below pre-COVID levels, and based on the debt ceiling agreement spending in 2024 will be not only below pre-COVID levels, it will be below year 2000 levels. What more can they want?
I'm not pretending to be naive here. Needless to say, I know exactly what they want: whatever number produces the biggest cuts in programs that liberals want. They give the game away with their other demands:
These are just wet dreams, not things that have even a remote chance of passage. But this is their price for agreeing to a temporary spending extension if new budgets aren't ready by the September 30 deadline—which everyone knows they won't be. So it's basically just a fancy way of saying they won't vote for an extension under any circumstances because they'd prefer to shut down the government instead.
Still, as crazy as the HFC is, none of this would be a problem if Kevin McCarthy were willing to pass a clean extension with both Republican and Democratic votes. It's only his insistence on passing an extension solely with Republican votes that gives the HFC any power. Without their votes, Republicans can't gin up a majority on their own. Bring in Democrats, though, and there's no problem putting together a bipartisan majority.
What's wrong with that?
This is a bearded iris growing in the Canadian WWII cemetery in Bény-sur-Mer. The cemetery is near Juno Beach, about ten miles north of Caen in Normandy. The stark background of the flower is not due to any kind of photoshopping. It was growing against a white gravestone, and in the sunlight it was bright enough to appear completely featureless.
I don't have any special reason for posting this, but it's something I noticed a while back and felt like sharing:
The thing I noticed is that even during recessions consumer spending barely changes at all. Half the time it actually goes up, and the other half of the time it declines only slightly. The only significant drop in consumer spending was during the Great Recession in 2008.
And consumer spending virtually never drops before a recession, so it's of no use as a bellwether. It just keeps increasing until suddenly it doesn't.
For what it's worth, this is per-capita spending, so it's a mean, not a median. This means it's skewed upward by the small number of zillionaires in the sample. It would be interesting to compare this to median consumer spending, which would give us a better idea of spending just in the middle income range, but as far as I know the BEA doesn't publish that.
UPDATE: Here are consumer expenditures just for the middle income range:
This only goes back to 1984 and it's annual, so it's not as useful as the top chart. However, it shows roughly the same thing: flat spending in 1991, increased spending in 2001, and sharply lower spending in 2008.
For what it's worth, here's a chart showing the latest on the inverted yield curve, a condition where the yield on long-term bonds is lower than the yield on short-term bonds:
As you can see, the inverted yield has a perfect track record of predicting recessions over the past 50 years. However, it takes 1-2 years between the time the yield curve goes negative and the start of the recession.
So where does that leave us? It's been a little more than a year since our current inversion started. Also note that the current inversion is the deepest since 1980. This suggests a strong recession will start sometime toward the end of the year.
Or maybe not. The inverted yield has a good track record, but the pandemic has screwed everything up. Maybe this time it will finally fail.
For some reason the BLS does an annual report about people who were born from 1957-1964. Why? It's a bit of a mystery. But since that cohort includes me, let's see what they have to say.
I guess that's about it. You're welcome.
These two stories both ran on the same day. First is the Wall Street Journal:
Pay for new hires is starting to shrivel after years of hefty salary bumps, requiring workers to reset what financial gains to expect from switching to a new job.
Wages, especially for people who changed jobs, climbed in recent years as companies competed for workers to fill pandemic-induced labor shortages. Now, as the job market cools and businesses become more cautious in their hiring, many companies are paying new recruits less than they did just months ago—in some cases, much less.
When employers deliver a job offer, it had better come with some teeth: Americans’ wage expectations have hit record highs, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey released Monday.
Job seekers’ average reservation wage — the lowest pay they’d be willing to take for a new job — climbed to $78,645 in July 2023, up nearly 8% from July of last year.
So . . . apparently workers are demanding more—a lot more—and employers are offering less—a lot less. This doesn't strike me as a stable situation. Something has to give, and I suspect it's going to be workers.
Alternatively, both of these stories are standard business press bullshit—the former because it relies on unreliable data from the likes of ZipRecruiter and Gusto, and the latter because it's based on a survey instead of something from real life. I report, you decide.
Just in case anyone could use a refresher, here are the most recent six "scandals" that have preoccupied Republicans during the last two Democratic administrations:
And here's how they turned out:
Benghazi (2012-14): There was no "stand down" order and no denial of air support. Nobody lied about the cause of the enemy attack. Administration statements were generally accurate given what was known at the time they were made. The "Innocence of Muslims" video really did play a role in the attacks. Security at the consulate was sufficient, and in any case was provided mostly by the CIA, not State. There was no cover-up related to security. The attack was primarily opportunistic, not planned, and was carried out by a mixed group. There was no incompetence on the part of Hillary Clinton or the State Department.
Two years after the attack, all of this was finally acknowledged by Republicans when the House Select Intelligence Committee—controlled by Republicans—issued its final report. Their exoneration of the White House was sweeping and nearly absolute.
IRS (2013): Initially the IRS released records that made it look like they were targeting tea party groups over their tax-exempt status. However, that was because the initial demand from Republicans had been solely for records of conservative groups. It took several years, but when a broader record search was done it turned out there had never been any partisan conduct at all from the IRS. In fact, liberal groups had actually been targeted far more than conservative groups.
Hillary's email (2015-16): In the end, the final FBI report showed that Hillary had done nothing seriously wrong. She used a single account hosted on a private server for both work and personal emails, which was probably a mistake in judgment but not done with any intent to withhold anything. There is no evidence that any foreign adversary hacked the server. She turned over all official emails when requested. Before she handed them over her lawyers culled out personal emails, and there's no evidence that any work emails were deleted in the process. In fact, extensive evidence makes it all but impossible that this happened. Her personal server was eventually wiped clean, but this was part of a routine change in record retention policy that was botched by her hosting service. During her time as Secretary of State she sent and received only three classified emails, all of them trivial. After the fact, State and CIA argued over some other emails—almost none of them initiated by Hillary—with CIA concluding that they should have been classified. Hillary did nothing wrong except for relying on State's classification in real time. The FBI's report is an almost complete exoneration of Hillary.
Durham investigation (2019-23): John Durham was appointed in hopes of demonstrating that the FBI's investigation of Donald Trump's ties to Russia was unfounded and illegal. However, despite continual leaks and feverish indictments insinuating otherwise, Durham never found anything of the sort. In the end he indicted only three people, all on trivial charges, and even so managed to lose two at trial and win only a plea deal on the third. We know now that, in fact, Trump's presidential campaign did have links to the Russian government. The FBI did have a perfectly sensible reason to open an investigation into this. Vladimir Putin did try to interfere with the election in Trump's favor. There were never any intelligence operations targeting Trump. There were no illegal actions by the Hillary Clinton campaign. And several members of Durham's team did quit because of disagreements with him over prosecutorial ethics. Every leak from Durham produced excited reports from Fox News, but by the time he was finished he had produced nothing.
Afghanistan (2021): Joe Biden didn't set the date of withdrawal. It had been set by Donald Trump during the previous administration. The evacuation was chaotic for the first four hours of the first day, but proceeded efficiently for the the rest of the month. The State Department worked heroically to approve visas in the face of obstacles previously put in place by Trump aides. Over 100,000 people were flown out, including all but 300 Americans. There were almost no fatalities aside from a single ISIS suicide bomber. All in all, it was an impressive operation by the Pentagon and State Department under the most difficult circumstances imaginable.
Hunter Biden (2020-present): Hunter's infamous laptop—mysteriously produced by Rudy Giuliani just before the 2020 election—ended up revealing nothing but some embarrassing tidbits. Joe Biden didn't try to get a Ukranian prosecutor fired because he was investigating Burisma, Hunter's employer. It was official administration policy—and the policy of most Western countries—to pressure Ukraine to fire the prosecutor because he was corrupt. Although Hunter failed to pay his taxes for two years, he eventually settled with the IRS and paid them in full. To this day there remains no evidence that Joe Biden was involved with Hunter. In fact, there's barely any evidence that Hunter himself ever did anything illegal.
Under the circumstances, is there any good reason to think that any Republican investigation is worth believing? All of them have been characterized by a constant drip of misleading leaks and none of them have stood the test of time. On this score, Republicans should always be presumed guilty until they prove their innocence.
I just got back from my 6th COVID vaccination.
It's all for the best, since my last one was a year ago, but that's not why I got it. I got it because it turns out the CAR-T procedure wiped out all my existing immunities. I only found this out a couple of weeks ago, which means I've been wandering around for the past couple of months with no COVID immunity.
Anyway, I now have a year's worth of vaccinations to get, everything from flu to polio to Tdap—although, oddly, not MMR. I wonder why I don't need that one?