Month: August 2024

Last Wednesday night Kamala Harris offered some proposals to fight price gouging. They've gotten pretty bad reviews in the press, so I was curious to read what she actually said. Not paraphrases from reporters or speculation about what she "probably" meant from columnists. Just what she actually said.

That turned out to be surprisingly hard! Her campaign released a statement, but it's nowhere to be found. However, I finally tracked down a reporter who, I think, reprinted the whole thing. Here it is:

Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz will work to enact a plan in their first 100 days to go after bad actors to bring down Americans’ grocery costs and keep inflation in check. They will work with Congress to:

• Advance the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries.
• Set clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive profits on food and groceries.
• Secure new authority for the FTC and state attorneys general to investigate and impose strict new penalties on companies that break the rules.

Extreme consolidation in the food industry has led to higher prices that account for a large part of higher grocery bills. To confront this issue, Vice President Harris will also direct her administration to crack down on unfair mergers and acquisitions that give big food corporations the power to jack up food and grocery prices and undermine the competition that allows all businesses to thrive while keeping prices low for consumers.

And her plan will support smaller businesses, like grocery stores, meat processors, farmers, and ranchers, so those industries can become more competitive.

As many people have commented, there's not much detail here. Basically, she'll task the FTC with investigating companies that "break the rules," but there's no explanation of what rules she has in mind. Her only firm proposal is to "crack down" on unfair mergers, which just means getting aggressive on antitrust and price fixing, which is already illegal.

Here's what she added in a speech she gave on Friday:

I will work to pass the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food. My plan will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules, and we will support smaller food businesses that are trying to play by the rules and get ahead.

We will help the food industry become more competitive, because I believe competition is the lifeblood of our economy. More competition means lower prices for you and your families.

There's a little more here: the penalties are for companies that break the rules during crises. Our best guess about what this means comes from her own past:

In 2020, when Harris was a U.S. senator, she co-sponsored legislation that would have defined price gouging in an emergency as charging more than 10 percent above the previous average price. The bill built in a defense for sellers that could show price hikes flowed from their own rising costs. The proposal was modeled after California's anti-price gouging law, which Harris warned businesses against violating when she was the state's attorney general.

Most states already have laws very similar to this, so it's unclear how much difference a federal law would make. That said, the evidence suggests Harris wants two things:

• A federal law similar to existing state laws that prohibits sudden, unjustified price hikes during emergencies (floods, hurricanes, pandemics, etc.).
• More aggressive enforcement of price-fixing and antitrust regulations.

There's nothing about price controls here, and not even much suggestion of anti-gouging action outside of natural disasters (and even then, only if it's gratuitous gouging, not price hikes due to higher wholesale costs). This may or may not be a good idea, bit it's surprisingly modest given the ruckus it produced in the press.

In the Washington Post today, David Lynch writes about the economic problems of Erie, Pennsylvania, a "left behind" community that's been devastated by the decline of the Rust Belt.

And make no mistake: Erie is a very poor area, with low incomes and high poverty rates. And yet, there's something interesting about it:

At its height, incomes in Erie were about the same as the national average. Its decline began in the Reagan era and then it was decimated in the aughts by the exit of manufacturing to China.

But more recently there's a surprise that doesn't quite fit the narrative: Erie has rebounded pretty strongly during the past decade. Over the past twelve years, the median household income has gone up 26% even after adjusting for inflation. That compares to 16% for the rest of the country.

This still leaves Erie pretty far behind the US average. Nevertheless, that rebound is surely worth taking note of. Sometimes the world is more complicated than a simple, phoned-in narrative can account for.

The Washington Post reports that Kamala Harris has a "slight" lead over Donald Trump in its latest poll:

Harris stands at 49 percent to Trump’s 45 percent among registered voters in a head-to-head matchup.... Given the margin of error in this poll, which tests only national support, Harris’s lead among registered voters is not considered statistically significant.

Technically this is right, but it's a damn close call. In a poll with 1,975 respondents a 4-point lead might not quite be significant at the conventional 95% level, but it is at the 92% level. That's a pretty high probability that Harris really is ahead.

UPDATE: The ABC News report on the poll says Harris leads 51-45 among likely voters. That's extremely statistically significant no matter what standard you use.

Oh great. It's no longer possible to download the Barnes & Noble Nook app, which means there's no way to install it on my new tablet. This in turn means that the ~100 books I have on Nook are now gone. Pffft. I will never be able to read them again.

Three cheers for the intersection of modern technology and crappy corporations.

Quick question: how's the performance of the blog these days? Normal? A little sluggish? Lightning fast? Infuriatingly slow?

Just curious. I'm just wondering how my hosting company is doing lately.

UPDATE: OK, thanks. The reason I asked, obviously, is that performance lately has been abysmal and I was hoping against hope that it was just me. But it's not.

I use Bluehost, and for the first couple of years it was fine. Then it started to deteriorate and a few months ago it just imploded. Occasionally it's fine, but usually it's molasses slow and it constantly loses connection to the server or throws up a 5xx error. A bit of googling suggests that everyone hates Bluehost these days because their performance has become so bad.

So I suppose I should switch hosting services, even though the thought fills me with dread. In theory it's easy: make a backup, restore to the new server, wait for the new DNS to propagate, and you're done. In reality, I know there's no chance of things going so smoothly. Plug-ins? Comments? Stored images? RSS feed? Etc. etc.

But I'll have to bite the bullet eventually. Anyone have recommendations for a reliable WordPress hosting service?

Donald Trump, economic genius:

This brings up the eternal question: Is he lying or is he really so stupid he believes this? I mean, who does he think collects tariffs?¹ From whom?² Does he think we send the bill to Xi Jinping, who then sends us a check?³

This is not one of those things where liberal and conservative economists disagree. It's just a boring bit of accounting. But I suspect Trump simply doesn't know this and no one has the courage to tell him. It's startling to say this is the least of his problems, but it's true: He's a moron. And it's the least of his problems.

¹Answer: Customs and Border Protection.

²Answer: Whoever is importing the goods. Eventually, consumers pay most or all of it in the form of higher prices.

³No, that's not how it works.

This week I learned how to do something new.

I have in mind an astrophotography target for next month—or maybe later in winter—that's far too big to fit in my telescope. The only way to capture it is by creating a mosaic: several separate images that are then stitched together. My software does this via something called a framing assistant, which I've looked at before but been immediately put off by its insane complexity.

But no. It turns out to be very cool and easy to use. So I headed out to my backyard and did a 2x2 mosaic of the North America nebula, which is also far too large for a single image. After a couple of false starts I got the mosaic below.

It's crappy, of course, and the fourth panel got ruined somehow. But it's a complete proof of concept. If it were better (and had all four panels and were rotated properly) it really would look sort of like North America, but don't blame yourself if you don't see it in this version. For reference, the streak in the lower left is Baja California looping up into Texas and the Gulf of Mexico.

One of these days I'll do a real version of this.

I noted the other day that the Fed has had no effect on inflation. However, the Fed is really good at one thing: making interest rates go up. When the Fed cranks up the reserve rate, interest rates do indeed go up. And the housing market naturally craters:

Housing starts went down another 100,000 in July. That's a drop of about half a million since the Fed started raising rates. In the past this has been a sign of impending recession, but not this time. So far.

I want to let you all in on a secret. You know the economic plans from Trump and Harris—tariffs, price gouging, no tax on tips, 3 million new houses, etc.?

None of it is going to happen. It's just empty, meaningless campaign talk.

Now you know.