Author: Kevin Drum

This is Charlie sitting innocently next to a tree in our backyard. A few seconds after I took this he galloped up the tree, jumped onto the wall, and made his escape. He showed up shortly afterward in our neighbor's backyard.

This is the first episode of catblogging taken with my new camera. Did I need a new camera? Not really, but a bunch of desires have accumulated over the years and I finally decided to give in to them. For those of you who care about such things, it's a Nikon Zfc and this picture was taken with a Tokina 11-16mm (16-24mm equivalent) zoom lens at its widest setting. The Zfc is an odd camera, but seems to be pretty good aside from one or two little weirdnesses. It's also very small, which is standard these days, something I don't like since I have big hands. But I'll get used to it.

I don't know whether to laugh at this piece from Politico or to be disgusted or something else:

Whenever Vice President Kamala Harris mentions Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s now-toxic blueprint for the next Republican administration — blood starts throbbing in the temples of certain conservative Heritage veterans.... “I cannot think of a study that has done more damage,” said Ken Weinstein, a one-time former President Donald Trump appointee and former head of the conservative Hudson Institute. “It’s the exact opposite of the Harris approach of don’t say anything about what you’re doing.”

The case for laughing at this is pretty obvious. Nuff said.

The case for disgust is the fact that conservatives are upset that Heritage actually said what they believe in public. And make no mistake: the case against Project 2025 is all about tone, not policy substance. Conservatives are all on board with its policy recommendations.

Then there's the case for pity. Project 2025 is just the latest edition of Heritage's Mandate for Leadership series, published in election years ever since Reagan was president. Nobody ever complained before, so why now?

The Politico piece suggests the problem is all about style:

The bitterness these days focuses on a new house style that allegedly enabled the current embarrassment: an elevation of marketing over research; a chest-thumping tendency to assert dominance within the Trump-era right; an inability to distinguish partisan agitation from policy advocacy because “engagement on X, positive feedback from Slack channels or mentions in their news feeds” have become paramount, in the words of one conservative activist who watched Project 2025 take shape.

Sure, whatever. But it's not as if Heritage has ever been a watchword for rigorous, honest research in the first place. And the entire conservative movement has become Trumpist, so you can hardly blame Heritage for following along.

Maybe Heritage could have worded things less belligerently. But for the most part the policy recommendations are garden variety modern conservatism. They just aren't hedged for a popular audience, which is typical of these things.

In the end, then, put me down for disgust. Conservatives are mostly mad simply because their true beliefs have been set down in black and white—and the Harris campaign has decided to highlight them. Boo hoo.

The BLS released its August report on import prices today. They were down 0.3%, or 3.7% on an annualized basis.

But here's a more interesting long-term look at import prices adjusted for overall inflation:

Why do we buy so many imported goods? Because they're cheap! The price of imported goods, after adjusting for overall inflation, has dropped 23% over the last decade and 38% since 1990. Why wouldn't we buy them?

NOTE: And do you see that ~20% increase during the pandemic? It was largely responsible for our inflation spike. It's over now, and so is inflation.

If we give away welfare to poor people with no work requirements attached, does this make them lazy and indolent? It's hardly a nonsensical idea, though there's not much evidence that it happens in real life.

More importantly, however, is that nearly all of our big means-tested welfare programs do have work requirements. The main exception is Medicaid because, generally speaking, we don't want people dying in the streets even if they don't have a job. Here are the rest of the Big Seven welfare programs:

• CHIP: Explicitly limited to families with incomes above the poverty line.
• SSI: Explicitly for the sick and disabled who are unable to work.
• EITC: Explicitly limited to the working poor.
• SNAP: Requires work unless you're caring for a child under six.
• TANF: Designed from the start to require work.
• Housing assistance: Generally no work requirement.

You might want to add the Child Tax Credit to this list, but it's not a means-tested program. Everyone is eligible for it up to an income of half a million dollars. In any case, it's a tax credit and therefore requires some income, though not very much.

When I show crime rates I normally use the FBI's figures, which are tallied up from police reports. An alternate source is the National Crime Victimization Survey, which calls up people and asks them if they've been the victim of a crime in the past year.

The NCVS figures for 2023 were released today, but there are a couple of things you have to do to compare them with the FBI numbers. First, the "all violent crime" category has to include only aggravated assault, not simple assault, since that's how the FBI does it. Second, you have to include only crimes reported to the police. Luckily the NCVS reports the numbers this way in addition to providing a simple headline number.

As it turns out, neither of these things affect the trend numbers much, but you still have to do it if you want an apples-to-apples comparison. Here it is:

Using the modified NCVS numbers, violent crime was down 6% in 2023. Using the raw headline number, crime was down 10%.

One thing you'll notice is that the NCVS bounces around a lot, so single-year figures aren't super reliable. Another thing you'll notice is that there was no pandemic crime spike.

That's because there wasn't, though no one seems to have noticed. There was a pandemic murder spike, but even the FBI figures show only tiny changes in overall violent crime during the pandemic. The NCVS—which doesn't count homicides since you can't survey homicide victims—shows a considerable crime decline during the pandemic.

So what really happened? My best read of the evidence is that murders went way up in 2020 and have been declining ever since, while other violent crime probably changed very little. The yearly NCVS numbers jump around a bunch but always revert to a mean a little below 0.4%, just like the FBI's numbers. That's probably about where they've been for the entire past decade except for the 2020-22 murder spree, which remains unexplained.

Today Peter Coy takes on our habit of measuring inflation as the total over the past 12 months. He says this is like ignoring a football play that just happened and instead announcing only the results of the past 12 plays:

Can’t blame the government for this. The headline on the news release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that came out on Wednesday was this: “C.P.I. for All Items Rises 0.2% in August; Shelter Up.” That’s the one-month change in the Consumer Price Index. It’s the equivalent of telling people what happened on the latest play from the line of scrimmage.

But reports about that announcement said things like this: “Inflation fell in August to 2.5 percent, down from 2.9 percent in July.” Summing up the price change over the past 12 months through August is the equivalent of summing up the total yardage over the past 12 plays.

Quite so. And here's something you might not know. The chart below shows monthly inflation over the past 24 months:¹

Housing inflation remains a problem, though it doesn't affect the two-thirds of people who own homes and only mildly affects the two-thirds of the remainder who haven't moved recently. In other words, for about 90% of Americans inflation has averaged 1.5% over the past two years.

¹It's actually a rolling average to smooth out the spikes a little bit.

The Pac-12 lives!

Sort of. It's now the Pac-6. Washington State and Oregon State, which never found new homes after the conference collapsed last year, have recruited Boise State, San Diego State, Colorado State and Fresno State to form the nucleus of a new and reinvigorated Pac-something.

Moneywise, it's all stupid. The other Pac-12 schools paid big breakup fees when they left, and that money is being used to pay the breakup fees for the four new schools. That money will now probably be used by the Mountain West to recruit some new teams of their own. Crikey.

At a minimum the new Pac needs eight teams to meet NCAA rules. So who else should they recruit? UNLV? Hawaii? San Jose State? BYU?

Here's a pretty little yellow wildflower. I'm too lazy to try and find out what it is, but maybe someone in comments can identify it?

This is an all-time great headline:

One right-wing crackpot is in a feud with another right-wing crackpot and it's front page news. May God have mercy on us all.

Lord help me, but I read a Wall Street Journal op-ed last night. I keep promising myself never to do this, but sometimes I backslide. The topic of last night's piece was "Welfare Is What’s Eating the Budget."

It was co-authored by Phil Gramm—remember him?—and it was odd even by Journal standards. It contained a blizzard of statistical claims but not a single one was sourced to anything. Here are three of them:

• Means-tested social-welfare spending totaled $1.6 trillion in 2023.
  .
  This is only the case if you use pandemic-level figures, which were temporary and highly inflated. According to the OMB, social welfare spending in 2019 came to about $1.1 trillion. Half of that was Medicaid and the other half was everything else.
• Since funding for the War on Poverty ramped up in 1967, welfare payments received by the average work-age household in the bottom quintile of income recipients has risen from $7,352 in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars to $64,700 in 2022.
  .
  Gramm is seriously claiming that poor households in the US, on average, receive $64,700 in welfare benefits? The Congressional Budget Office puts it at $16,300 in 2019.
• With the explosion of means-tested transfer payments, the portion of prime work-age persons in the bottom quintile who actually work has fallen to 36% from 68%.
  .
  I have no idea where Gramm got this. According to the CBPP, the share of low-income people who work has been steadily between 60-70% for half a century. Other research supports this.
  .
  

The Journal editorial page is like Donald Trump: it lies baldly all the time. Usually, though, they're a bit more sophisticated about it. They at least pretend they get their numbers from somewhere. Gramm doesn't even bother.

As usual with these things, what's really odd is that you can use real numbers and still make your case that social welfare spending has increased a lot (it has) and that cutting it should be part of tackling the deficit (I don't agree, but the numbers are large enough to be meaningful). But that's never enough for these guys.