Month: September 2024

A couple of days ago I mentioned that the share of foreign born workers in the US had accelerated a bit over the past two years. This was largely because the number of native born workers had flattened out, and I wasn't sure if this was due to native workers being pushed out of the labor force or just because of boomer retirements.

It's the latter. Here's the labor force participation rate for prime age workers:

For native born workers, the prime age participation rate is higher than it was before the pandemic and higher than it's been since 2002. Nobody's been pushed out of the labor force by foreign born workers.

NOTE: The BLS doesn't make it easy to find this information. They also provide data only by ten-year age bands, not for age 25-54, so the numbers I used are averages of the three age bands from age 25 to age 54. Here's the raw data if you don't trust this whole averaging business.

I was looking for some old photographs last night and ran across my pictures of Hilbert when we first brought him home ten years and two cameras ago. So today you get a stroll down memory lane. Hilbert isn't quite a kitten in these pictures—he was ten months old when we adopted him—but he still had a bit of a kittenish look to him. Such a cutie pie.

Over at National Review, Dominic Pino has a sarcastic post about Democratic efforts to collect unpaid taxes from rich people by amping up IRS enforcement. I don't care much about the fact that some of the estimates for revenue collection were a little crazy, but even putting that aside Pino has a point. Using the CBO estimates that were used to score the initiative, here's how we're doing:

The $1.3 billion figure comes from a Treasury Department press release today. It only goes through August, but since the fiscal year ends in four weeks I doubt it's going to change much. We're not collecting a fraction of what CBO estimated.

Of course, there are multiple possible reasons for this. The two most obvious are (a) the estimates were always fantasy, and (b) it's taken way longer to start up the program than anyone planned. Both of these are perfectly plausible. It's going to be another year or two before we really know.

As you all know by now, a couple of days ago the Justice Department indicted a pair of Russian nationals who work for the propaganda outlet RT. They are charged with secretly bankrolling Tenet Media, a startup content farm that churned out right-wing videos. But why?

Unlike Russian efforts to seed social media with low-quality bots and trolls that earn little, if any engagement, the alleged scheme helped to launch Tenet as a serious player in conservative media, fueled by content from Trump-supporting personalities who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election, had well-known views hostile to U.S. support for Ukraine in its war against Russia and advanced narratives that at times aligned with Russian talking points.

I doubt this was part of an effort to reelect Donald Trump. Tenet's viral videos were quite obviously aimed at true believers who were already committed to Trump.

Most likely, its aim was simpler: persuading right-wingers not to support Ukraine. They're the ones listening to Tenet, after all, not centrists or liberals. And Russia has been remarkably successful in this. What's interesting is that their efforts all along have been aimed at conservatives, who would normally be thought of as tougher sells. But the combination of Ukraine being "Biden's war" along with Donald Trump's sympathetic views of Russia made the far right natural targets. It's worked pretty well.

The American economy gained 142,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 52,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate ticked down to 4.2%.

Employment numbers for the previous two months were revised downward, so we've now had three consecutive months of very meager job growth.

Average hourly earnings jumped 4.9% at an annualized rate while weekly earnings rose 8.6%. Average weekly earnings grew a stunning 15% in the financial sector. These are very strong numbers, especially considering that recent inflation readings have been under 1%.

Generally speaking, this jobs report shouldn't sway the Fed from going ahead with its rate cut this month. But the earnings growth might give it pause.

Vox points me today to a new paper suggesting the following sequence of events:

1. In 2006, a fungal disease called white nose syndrome starts killing off bats.
2. Bats fail to eat insects.
3. Farmers have to use more pesticide.
4. Pesticides kill babies.
5. Infant mortality goes up.

Here's the inevitable chart:

The researcher, Eyal Frank, found that insecticide use went up nearly a third—from 33 grams per acre to 44 grams per acre—in counties with outbreaks of white nose syndrome. In those same counties, at the same time as the surge in insecticides, infant mortality went up about 8%—from 6.8 per thousand to 7.4 per thousand—compared to counties that didn't increase insecticide use.

Correlation by itself is not causation, but in this case there's a pretty obvious causal mechanism available. There's probably something to this.

Just for fun, I want to show you what would happen if, against all odds, Donald Trump enacted a 20% tariff on all imports and it had no effect on the volume of imports. Here it is:

For example, in 2023 the federal government had a budget deficit of $1.8 trillion. Total imports—every car, every refrigerator, and every other physical object shipped into the country—added up to $3.1 trillion. Taking 20% of that nets you $600 billion. If every dollar of this was dumped into the general fund, the budget deficit would have gone down to.......

$1.2 trillion.

This is all ridiculous, of course. Even Trump couldn't apply 20% to everything, and if he did imports would drop significantly—which would reduce the tariff revenue.

Has any reporter ever asked Trump how much money he thinks his 20% tariffs would raise? Forget the details. Does he even know the simplest possible thing: how much we import and how much 20% of that is? Even Trump would have a hard time evading a question so straightforward.

OK, I admit that this is pretty amusing:

Trump is genuinely incoherent here. You really have to listen to understand how bad it is. As best I can make out, he's saying he'll raise so much money from tariffs that the federal deficit will go away and there will still be such vast sums left over that fixing child care will be trivial.

Sure. Ironically, the better answer is one that's political suicide:

There was a period in the '90s and aughts when the cost of child care really was rising faster than wages, but that hasn't been the case for over a decade. Since the end of the Great Recession, wages have risen considerably more than the cost of child care.

Nor is there a shortage of child care. The number of child care workers is higher than in 2019 and way higher than in 2012 (1.1 million vs. 850,000). Ditto for child care revenue ($16 billion compared to $11 billion, after adjusting for inflation). All while the number of children under ten has shrunk by 4%.

I'm all in favor of making child care easier and more affordable for families, but there's no crisis here. Trump could have said this if he'd known it. But needless to say, he doesn't have a clue.

This is a masked lapwing at the LA Zoo.

The BLS reported revised Q2 productivity today, and while I was fiddling around with it I came across a question I couldn't answer: how are we doing in the post-pandemic era? Here are your two choices:

If we assume linear growth before the pandemic, we're doing well. If we assume exponential growth, we're behind the curve.

I suppose this really ought to be modeled as exponential growth, which means our post-pandemic performance has been a little weak. All those robots and LLMs aren't having an effect yet.