Month: February 2024

Didn't House Republicans already agree to spending guidelines for the federal budget? So why are they still haggling?

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, announced on Sunday that leaders had failed to reach a deal over the weekend because “House Republicans need more time to sort themselves out.” Speaker Mike Johnson accused Senate Democrats of “attempting at this late stage to spend on priorities that are farther left than what their chamber agreed upon.”

Huh. So what are these far-left priorities? Politico fills us in:

Negotiators are still haggling over three main policy disagreements, including whether to preserve gun rights for military veterans who need fiduciary help with their VA benefits.

....Democrats are also demanding more funding for a federal nutrition program that supports low-income moms and babies.... Republicans want a concession in exchange for agreeing to that and have proposed adding a five-state pilot program that would restrict the types of food people can buy with SNAP benefits.

Republicans are also fighting to nix three earmarks that would direct a total of more than $3 million to three programs that serve LGBTQ people in Democrat-led districts, including two community centers and a program that provides housing assistance to seniors.

The gun thing is a weird change to VA policy that has nothing to do with Democrats. So what Johnson is griping about is (a) more funding for food going to mothers and babies, and (b) killing $3 million—yes, that's million with an M—in funding for gay community centers.

Are we really close to shutting down the government over this trivia? Preventing SNAP recipients from buying soda plus a random and unprecedented attack on a tiny earmark for gay people? jfc.

Today Paul Krugman discusses a new book by Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. In particular, Krugman agrees that rural areas have hemorrhaged jobs, leaving behind a loss of purpose and dignity:

This feeling of a loss of dignity may be worsened because some rural Americans have long seen themselves as more industrious, more patriotic and maybe even morally superior to the denizens of big cities.... In the crudest sense, rural and small-town America is supposed to be filled with hard-working people who adhere to traditional values, not like those degenerate urbanites on welfare, but the economic and social reality doesn’t match this self-image.

Prime working-age men outside metropolitan areas are substantially less likely than their metropolitan counterparts to be employed — not because they’re lazy, but because the jobs just aren’t there.

I'm once again prompted to point out that while this is true, it's not that true. For example, here's the share of full-time workers in urban and rural areas:

It's almost identical at every age level for both men and women. In both places, about 80% of men and 65% of women have full-time jobs.

Here's the overall labor force participation rate:

Among prime-age men, the participation rate is about 88% in cities and 85% in the country. The difference is even smaller among women.

Now, pay is considerably less in rural areas: the median income for men is about $52,000 compared to $60,000 in cities. However, when you account for the far lower cost of housing in rural areas, a lot of this difference goes away.

These figures are all from 2016, but I don't imagine they've changed a lot since then. More to the point, however, there's nothing new about this. Urban men earn about 15% more than rural men, but the Fed puts the overall urban/rural wage difference in recent years at about 20-23%:

So how does this compare to 40 years ago? In 1980, according to the Census Bureau, median household income was $19,043 in cities and $15,350 in rural areas. That's a difference of.......24%.

This is a lot of charts and tables to make two simple points. First, the economic difference between urban and rural households isn't as great as people make it out to be, especially when you account for the cost of living. Second, to the extent there really is a difference, it's been around for a long time. City dwellers have always made more money than folks in the country, so this can hardly be the cause of a sudden surge of white rural rage in the Trump era.

So what's really going on? I'd guess that part of the answer is economic, but not at the individual level. Main street shops have gone away. Rural hospitals have shut down. The nearest doctor may be 50 miles away. There's no access to broadband internet.

This kind of slow lifestyle deterioration is unquestionably discouraging, but it's not really the sort of thing that produces rage. That's more likely to come from cultural issues like abortion, immigration, race, gay and trans rights, and so forth. I'm still guessing a bit here, but in the past the cultural difference between urban and rural wasn't quite so stark. Mores were relatively conservative everywhere—in public, at least—and in any case, urban debauchery was a long way away. Today it's only as far away as your TV set, and urban culture overwhelms contemporary TV, especially among cable outlets. That can feel pretty oppressive.

Economically, though, I just don't see it. Rural areas today aren't doing any worse than rural areas have always done. The city is where you once went to make your fortune, and it still is.

I didn't have a hemorrhoid after all. I had an epidermal abscess. All hail Dr. Kim at the Kaiser ER in Irvine, who lanced it and drained it a couple of hours ago. Ten days of antibiotics and I should be right as rain.

If I had had any clue what this was, I would have gone in right away and maybe the antibiotics alone would have taken care of it. Next time I'll know.

This is a street in Ubaté, a town about 40 miles north of Bogotá in Colombia. It's my last picture from Colombia, and for some reason it's taken me the better part of five years to get around to posting it.

I am pleased to report that Google's Gemini AI says I'm not as bad as Hitler:

OK, Gemini wasn't explicitly willing to say I'm better than Hitler, but it does suggest that disagreeing with me isn't as bad as killing six million Jews, and any comparison of me to Hitler is harmful.¹ I'll take it.

¹Harmful to me? Or just harmful to society generally because comparing individuals is always harmful? Hmmm.

The United States is famously violent and awash in guns. Racism is practically a national creed. Drug abuse is rampant. We have the highest income inequality in the developed world. Our mass transit is laughable. We spend half our time in court suing each other. Our system of government is literally designed to make it impossible to do anything. American highways are death traps and we treat pedestrians like bowling pins. We're addicted to war.

In other words, we live in a chaotic and frequently ugly madhouse. And yet, we're the biggest and fastest growing major country in the world. We produce Nobel Prizes by the bucketload. We're the world leader by miles in software development. Our median income is among the highest on the planet. Entrepreneurship is off the charts. We're practically besieged by people who want to live here. Our universities are top ranked. By just about any broad measure, we've been the most successful large country in the world for the past 150 years and we still are.

This hardly makes any sense. And yet here we are.

Today the Wall Street Journal reports:

Peter Thiel’s $100,000 Offer to Skip College Is More Popular Than Ever
More Americans are rethinking the value of a college education

That's the headline. What the article actually says is that Thiel backs about 20 kids per year and will do so again this year.

Why the lack of growth? The hundred grand is to start up a company, and Thiel says it's harder than you'd think to find good entrepreneurs even when you offer them a fistful of dough. And these high school kids don't have much education!

“We don’t believe education systems are working but that doesn’t mean we have a better way of education, so we’ve leaned into identifying talent and letting them figure it out,” Thiel says.

....“If you scale the program,” Thiel says, “you will have a lot more people who aren’t quite ready, you would then have to be super-confident you can develop them”—which Thiel and his colleagues say they aren’t skilled at doing.

So, anyway, that's 20 per year out of a freshman college enrollment of about 2 million per year, or 0.001%. I don't think Thiel is making much of a dent in the university-industrial complex.

Back in the day, we all worked for the same company our whole lives. Today, though, we job hop like frenzied rabbits. Right?

Apparently not. Median job tenure has increased considerably over the past 50 years, though some of that is due to the aging of society (older people have longer job tenures than younger workers). But even if you restrict yourself to a single youngish age group, job tenure has still increased. However, there's an exception: among workers at the end of their career, there was a significant drop through the mid-90s:

Generally speaking, job tenure has been steady or up over the past half century.  We don't job hop any more than we used to. However, the share of older workers with very long job tenures (ten years or more) has dropped from 59% to 50%.

The New York Times writes today:

In May 2023, Senator Charles E. Grassley, a chief antagonist of President Biden, strode to the Senate floor with some shocking news: He had learned, he said, of a document in the F.B.I.’s possession that could reveal “a criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden.”

This, of course, turned out to be Alexander Smirnov's claim of a $5 million bribe paid to Joe Biden, which was never credible in the first place and is now known to be not just untrue, but a deliberate invention originating with Russian intelligence.

At the time, Grassley said only that his information came from a "highly credible" whistleblower. I wonder who it was? I have a feeling it would be very interesting indeed to know.

Republicans have now had a full week to stick their fingers in the wind and decide how they're supposed to feel about Alabama's ruling that IVF embryos are God's children the same as the rest of us. But they still haven't figured it out. Donald Trump wrote a screeching post in favor of IVF today, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee quickly followed suit:

The messaging from the NRSC, contained in a memo obtained by The Washington Post, was accompanied by announcements from a rapidly growing number of GOP Senate candidates voicing support for IVF procedures, which the Alabama ruling threatens.

“When responding to the Alabama Supreme Court ruling, it is imperative that our candidates align with the public’s overwhelming support for IVF and fertility treatments,” NRSC Executive Director Jason Thielman wrote in a memo to “Senate Candidates” dated Friday.... “NRSC encourages Republican Senate candidates to clearly and concisely reject efforts by the government to restrict IVF,” he wrote.

I hardly need to point out that Republicans are desperately trying to tap dance around the question here. They obviously don't want to be on the wrong side of polls saying that Americans overwhelmingly support fertility treatments, but that's not enough. After all, no government is trying to restrict IVF. Nor is "support" for IVF at issue.

The sole question is whether an IVF embryo is considered a person. This has the effect of restricting access to IVF because it can turn negligence into murder. No one wants to take the risk of performing IVF if a wrong move means you could end up in court looking down the barrel of a wrongful death or manslaughter charge from an overzealous district attorney.

So the question for Republicans isn't whether they love IVF, it's whether they think life begins at conception, even if that life is being stored inside a hospital freezer at -320°F. The Alabama Supreme Court says yes. Nikki Haley says yes. The Catholic Church says yes. Many fundamentalist Christians say yes.

But the only way to support IVF is to say no. So what do Republicans say?