Month: August 2024

What was the original idea behind Donald Trump's visit to Arlington Cemetery? Was it just intended as an excuse to bash Biden and Harris for not showing up? I don't know. But Fox News is sure making it seem plausible:

There was, of course, no Arlington "event." It was just Trump hauling in a camera to capture video of him grinning and doing a thumbs-up in front of a grave. It was campaign theater and nothing more—and Fox News knows it.

This whole episode keeps getting creepier and more disgraceful. These guys just don't know when to quit.

Welp, it only took 50 years, but here we are:

In a milestone breakthrough, more than half of Caltech’s incoming undergraduate class in the fall will be women for the first time in its 133-year history. The class of 113 women and 109 men comes 50 years after Caltech graduated its first class of undergraduate women, who were admitted in 1970.

When I was there in 1976, I lived in Ruddock House, population 100. If memory serves, that included five or six women. Add one per year and in half a century that ratio is about even. Time and persistence were all it took.

PCE inflation remained subdued this month, with both core and headline numbers right around 2%:

On a conventional year-over-year basis, headline PCE clocked in at 2.5% and core PCE at 2.6%.

I caught a few minutes of the commentary after CNN's broadcast of the Kamala Harris interview and got annoyed all over again by Scott Jennings blathering about "Biden's inflation." I realize that I'm going to convince approximately no one, but it wasn't Biden's inflation. It was Trump's inflation.

Our recent surge in prices was not a normal inflationary episode caused by loose monetary policy. Those affect inflation indirectly and take some time to work their way into the economy. Rather, it was caused by a combination of two things: (a) a sudden, sharp fall in supply due to the pandemic, and (b) the $3.5 trillion CARES Act, which made up for lost income and kept demand at normal levels.¹ This has a direct impact on inflation, so it can work its way into the economy in only a few months. Here it is:

The first little burst of inflation in mid-2020 might be related to the CARES Act but is probably just an artifact, making up for the huge decline a few months before. But by the end of the year inflation crossed the 5% level for good and kept going up. Eventually, however, supply normalized and the CARES Act wore off. By the end of 2023 inflation was down to nearly normal levels.

Now, I don't really think this is "Trump's inflation" either. The supply collapse was due to the pandemic and the CARES Act was massively bipartisan. It was the right thing to do, even if a brief surge of inflation was the price we paid. Nobody in Congress was thinking about it this way, but we had a choice between a big recession or a bout of inflation, and we chose the inflation. It's certainly what I would have done.

The whole world went through roughly the same thing, although other countries stabilized demand in other ways. And it ended the same way throughout the world, when the pandemic eased and supply surged back.

Like I said, I know this is a hopeless cause. The inflation got bad on Biden's watch, therefore it's Biden's inflation. That's as sophisticated as popular thinking gets. But it ain't so.

¹In addition, the Fed lowered interest rates and began quantitative easing. This gave things an additional push.

Josh Marshall says that Donald Trump's campaign event at Arlington Cemetery was even worse than you think:

The idea was to lay a wreath honoring the 13 members of the U.S. military who were killed during the evacuation of Kabul in 2021 and film a political ad. They would distribute the video and attack Vice President Harris and President Biden for not “showing up” for their campaign event, which they sought to portray was an established memorial.

Is this true? Josh doesn't cite a source, which was obviously deliberate. I wonder why? On the other hand, it sure sounds like something Trump would do, doesn't it?

The Trump team's response to being caught with their hands in the cookie jar has been pure Trump: Attack, attack, and attack harder. A Trump spokesperson berated the Arlington official who asked them to stop as having a "mental health episode." After the Army defended her, a Trump campaign advisor blasted them as a bunch of "hacks." Trump himself posted a campaign video of the event and then insisted that it wasn't a campaign event and that it was he who had been mistreated. And J.D. Vance furiously told Kamala Harris to "go to hell" even though she hadn't said anything.

Welcome to another day in the Trump campaign.

Here's another poll of swing states, this time from Bloomberg/Morning Consult:

This is even more optimistic than this morning's Emerson College poll, though note that the margin of error is about 4% in each state.

NOTE: We're close enough to the election that from now on I'll be reporting the results of likely voters whenever possible.

Donald Trump must be desperately afraid that abortion is going to lose the election for him. A few years ago he was so anti-abortion he said that women should be jailed for getting an abortion. But now?

First he announces that he's in favor of banning abortion only after 15 weeks. He promises not to enforce the Comstock Act. Then he writes on Truth Social that he'll be the best president ever for "women and their reproductive rights." Next his running mate promises that Trump will veto any attempt to ban abortion nationwide. Finally, today, he takes a page out of the Swedish socialist playbook:

Free IVF for all! How long will it be before he announces a billion-dollar funding program for Planned Parenthood?

This is a Joshua tree lit by the setting sun at Joshua Tree National Park. I have to confess that Joshua trees don't do much for me, and I've never been entirely clear on why a thousand square miles of scrub and Joshua trees became a national park. But I'm sure it has a unique and fragile ecosystem etc. etc.

I noticed yesterday that the Atlantic's Yoni Appelbaum has a new book coming out next year called Stuck. It asks, "How did America cease to be the land of opportunity?"

Obviously I haven't read it yet, but it got me curious. Has America ceased being the land of opportunity? My own suspicion is that America was never quite the land of opportunity that legend has it, but gained that reputation because for a lot of immigrants it was a helluva lot better than what they had before.

But who cares what my suspicion is? I was curious about whether things have fallen apart in the past few decades for young people. Here are several metrics that make up what people think of as the American Dream. First, homeownership:

Are you surprised? Even with the growth of home prices, homeownership is the same among young people as it was in the '90s. Here is income:

There's a lot stagnation here thanks to the Great Recession, but that's in the past. Compared to 30 years ago, incomes of the youngest are up 30% and incomes of the next youngest are up 40%. That's not too bad. Here's a recent Fed report comparing income among generations:

Every generation has done better than the previous one, including both Millennials and Gen Z. Here is wealth, which was a big concern at one time but now looks perfectly normal:

Here is college:

College completion is far higher among young people than it was 30 years ago. It's nearly doubled during that time. Here is retirement:

Projections suggest that young people are likely to have a pretty prosperous retirement, although it may end up being a little less than Boomer retirement compared to average national income. Here is economic mobility:

This is from a 2015 paper, so it's a little dated, but it shows little change between children born in 1971 and Millennials born in 1992. Mobility hasn't improved, but neither has it declined. Finally, here is new business formation:

This series goes back only to 2005, and there's evidence that starting up your own business has declined over the long term. But more recently, after falling during the Great Recession, it's now at a higher rate than it was at the beginning of the century. These figures are not specifically for young people, but it's a good bet that most small business formation is done by the relatively young.

So . . . it looks like young people aren't really stuck. They've got legit problems with college loans and high housing prices, but overall they're doing as well or better than any generation in recent memory.

UPDATE: I've corrected the homeownership chart. I originally miscalculated the combined rate of the 18-24 and 25-34 age cohorts.

Here are the latest swing state results from Emerson College Polling:

It's close to a dead heat in the battleground states. Aside from Arizona, Kamala Harris is either ahead or within 1% in every state.

Fingers crossed.