Month: January 2024

We have some sensible news out of the Supreme Court today:

The Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration on Monday and cleared the way for border patrol agents to remove razor wire Texas officials installed along a busy stretch of the southern border until the legality of the barriers is resolved in court.

I don't have any strong opinions about exactly what kind of barrier we should have along our southern border. But no matter your own thoughts on this, it seems open and shut that border protection is up to the federal government, not the states. And yet a district court, an appellate court, and four Supreme Court justices disagreed. The Supreme Court's order in the government's favor was a bare 5-4.

So: sensible news, but only barely.

Here are a few charts that I created for no real reason. I was just fiddling around. The first shows real GDP per worker hour:

I tossed in a few big inventions just to drive home the point that practically nothing affects the growth rate of productivity more than a tiny bit. However, it's not quite the same if you look at GDP per worker:

The period from 1973 to 1982 was dead flat. We eventually made up for it, but not another 20 years.

Finally, here's a comparison of GDP with corporate profits:

For 50 years after World War II, corporate profits (adjusted for inflation) grew at a rate of 2% per year. Then, starting in the early 90s, profits suddenly took off, growing at a rate of more than 4% per year.

What happened in 1993 to cause this? In only 30 years corporate profits per hour worked have tripled. That's quite a trick.

Here's another one of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park. This one is called Cliff Palace, and you can see a tour group at center right. But I didn't have a reservation and probably couldn't have made the hike down there anyway. So a long distance view at midday is all I got.

Kevin Morris, a wealthy friend of Hunter Biden, was recently forced to testify behind closed doors before the House Oversight Committee, led by serial liar and attack dog James Comer. As usual, after Morris finished his testimony Comer immediately released an absurdly deceitful "readout" of his testimony.

Both Philip Bump and Steve Benen have reported on this. Both write at length about Comer's track record with this kind of thing, but because they work for serious media organizations they feel obligated to say that maybe, just maybe, Comer isn't lying this time.

That's absolutely the responsible thing to do. But I don't work for anyone, so I have no obligation to join in this nonsense. Comer is lying, period. He's been lying for months about Hunter Biden and he's still lying. Literally everyone knows this. Republicans adopted a strategy of immediately releasing deceptive summaries of interviews back in the Benghazi days, knowing that by the time a transcript was available—if ever—no one would care anymore. The Fox hits would have long since shaped the discourse. Bill Barr put this tactic to famous use in his insta-summary of the Mueller investigation.

We all know that Hunter Biden traded on his name, but he otherwise did nothing worth more than a misdemeanor charge. He's now under federal indictment for felonies solely because the special prosecutor caved into intense pressure from Republicans. As for Joe Biden, he's literally done nothing wrong and everyone knows this too. But that doesn't stop scum like Comer and never will.

I know I'm tiresome on this point, but this is your regular reminder that the stock market did not, in fact, break any records today—regardless of what the Wall Street Journal mindlessly regurgitates. Here is the S&P 500:

The S&P 500 peaked in late 2021, fell throughout 2022, and has not yet made up that loss. It still has about 300 points to go before setting a genuine record.

Atrios today:

You can't expect people to get excited about modest improvements, even if they are improvements. One can accept the very real constraints of our political system — even, perhaps, understand them — while also wondering why it is the apparent outer limit of what Biden wants.

I don't get this. Biden took office and immediately passed a gigantic $1.9 trillion spending bill that included a historic increase to the Child Tax Credit. He tried to pass a multi-trillion dollar BBB package that was probably the most ambitious social spending proposal since the New Deal. It failed only because Congress couldn't come together—and eventually because of Joe Manchin. Biden withdrew completely from Afghanistan despite strong pressure to leave troops there. He ordered a huge student loan relief, which failed only because the Supreme Court killed it. He has been absolutely steadfast in his support of Ukraine and Israel—for better or worse. He has appointed 165 judges, 90% of whom are not white males.

Whatever else you can say about Biden, he's shown that his outer limits are pretty far out there. He hasn't succeeded at everything, but he's pushed the envelope pretty hard.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, my beef isn't with the notion that most people don't know what Biden has done. Of course not. It's specifically with the claim that Biden hasn't even tried to do anything big.

The Republican primary is now officially a two-person race: Trump vs. Nikki Haley. But Trump is ahead by 15 points in the New Hampshire polls and by 30+ points in South Carolina and Nevada.

It's Trump vs. Biden in November, just like it's been all along. Assuming nobody drops dead, of course.

Over the past year, for no good reason aside from chronic tiredness, I've been reading less and instead watching a lot of old and new TV. Here's what I've watched in (very) rough order from best to worst. The shows in the bottom half of the list mostly suffered from getting a little tiresome toward the end.

Liked a lot:

1. Deadwood
2. Ozark
3. Boardwalk Empire
4. Travelers
5. Rome
6. Orange is the New Black
7. Bridgerton
8. Money Heist
9. Perry Mason
10. Lost in Space
11. True Detective
12. The Wire
13. Bosch
14. The Boys

Liked:

15. Game of Thrones
16. Umbrella Academy
17. Mad Men
18. Broadchurch
19. Clarkson's Farm
20. Night Sky
21. Queen's Gambit
22. Watchmen
23. Chernobyl
24. Painkiller (thanks entirely to Uzo Aduba)
25. Bodyguard
26. Halt and Catch Fire (first three seasons)
27. The OA

Not bad:

28. The Sopranos
29. Behind Her Eyes
30. The Peripheral
31. Russian Doll
32. Succession
33. The Leftovers
34. Mare of Easttown
35. The Expanse
36. Bodies

Meh:

37. Band of Brothers
38. Beef
39. Wheel of Time
40. The Mandalorian
41. 1899
42. In From the Cold
43. Counterpart
44. Squid Game
45. The English (though it had an odd charm)
46. The Magicians

No good:

47. Archive 81
48. Lupin
49. His Dark Materials
50. The Book of Boba Fett
51. Man in the High Castle
52. Jack Ryan
53. The Witcher
54. Dead to Me

This list doesn't include shows that I gave up on after watching a few episodes, including: Station Eleven, Ballers, Entourage, Barry, The Pacific, The Deuce, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry Sanders, Breaking Bad, The Diplomat, Shadow and Bone, Mr. Robot, Schitt's Creek, Veep, Emily in Paris, and Silicon Valley.

The New York Times has some pretty maps today showing how shipping through the Suez Canal is diverting around the Cape of Good Hope. They also have a chart showing how much this costs:

That doesn't look like an especially huge increase to me, but the chart was sourced to Freightos Data so I clicked around to see what they could tell me. Here are recent shipping costs:

The interesting thing is that although the biggest increases came in shipping diverted from the Suez, everything else surged too. The cost of shipping from China to the US west coast, which involves no canals at all, has nearly doubled. Shipment costs to the east coast have more than doubled. Even the short voyage from Europe to South America has gone up.

I don't quite get this. I suppose that delays due to avoiding the Suez might be soaking up additional ships, which would have a knock-on effect everywhere, but that doesn't seem like enough to double rates.

But who knows? Spot shipping rates are notoriously volatile, so maybe this is just par for the course.

POSTSCRIPT: Freightos data is specifically for ocean freight only, which makes me wonder why they say a "key port" on the US west coast is Chicago. The last time I looked it was neither an ocean port nor on the west coast.

In an essay about a hometown friend of his who recently passed away, Nick Kristof says, "There isn’t a good term for the bundle of pathologies that have afflicted working-class Americans like Bill."

Then, to drive home the point that working-class Americans are in trouble, he adds this:

One gauge of how many Americans are struggling is that average weekly nonsupervisory wages, a metric for blue-collar earnings, were lower in the first half of 2023 than they had been (adjusted for inflation) in the first half of 1969. That’s not a misprint.

It's not a misprint, but it's not right, either. The problem is that Kristof used CPI as his measure of inflation. That's not surprising since it's the most common measure, and I use it myself all the time. But only for recent history and over short periods.

Over longer periods CPI is badly off. Without diving into a bunch of niggling details, the best bet for long periods that go back far into the past is PCE inflation. Here's what blue-collar earnings look like:

Either way, blue-collar workers lost a lot of ground in the Reagan-Bush years. But they've recovered from that, and if you calculate inflation correctly blue collar wages are up 27% since 1969. That's still no great shakes, but it's way different from "lower than 1969."