Author: Kevin Drum

While we're on the subject of declining life expectancies for high school dropouts, here's another look at things:

This is for people with low incomes, which is not the same thing as dropouts. Still, it's in the same ballpark, so this chart tells us a few things:

• Income for the poor has gone up fairly steadily over the past 40 years.
• Poor people have consistently augmented their incomes by about 20% through means-tested government programs.
• Use of Medicaid and CHIP has increased very substantially.

So the answer to stagnant life expectancies probably isn't shrinking incomes. It's not related to the receipt of welfare benefits, either positively or negatively. And it's probably not due to collapsing medical care.

So what is it? Remember, we're looking for something that changed around 1998, and it has to be something that changed a lot more for the poor than the well-off.

If I had to guess, it's something related to diet. But what?

"Horse and cow ignoring each other," 2023. Pixel on pixel.

The Washington Post is running a series of pieces about declining life expectancies in the US, and it reminds me of this chart:

The real problem with falling life expectancies is with high school dropouts, not just everyone without a BA. That got me curious about the economic decline of high school dropouts. I was (very) surprised to discover this:

Among men, participation in the labor force has been dropping for decades. But among high school dropouts, it's been going up. It's nearly eight points higher today than it was 30 years ago. Here's income:

Income is up too. High school dropouts took a big hit during the Great Recession, but so did everyone else. Overall, their real incomes are up 18% over the past three decades.

It's worth noting that US life expectancies among dropouts started to diverge from other countries around the year 1998. But looking at both income and labor force participation, nothing happened at that time. Both continued a steady march upward that lasted until the Great Recession.

Whatever the cause of dropping life expectancies among the poorly educated, it's not economics. At least, it sure doesn't seem like it. So what was it? What changed in 1998 and stayed changed for the next 25 years?

Ukraine's attacks on Russian ships docked in Crimea have proven remarkable effective—and apparently unstoppable:

Russia has moved powerful vessels including three attack submarines and two frigates from Sevastopol to other ports in Russia and Crimea that offer better protection, according to Western officials and satellite images verified by naval experts.

....The move represents a remarkable setback for Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose military seizure of Crimea in 2014 marked the opening shots in his attempt to take control of Ukraine. His full-scale invasion of last year has now boomeranged, forcing the removal of ships from a port that was first claimed by Russia in 1783 under Catherine the Great.

This is an isolated incident, and it features ships at dock. On the other hand, Ukraine is not exactly a major military power. It makes you wonder about the sustainability of modern navies in the face of masses of cheap drones.

I'm repeating myself a lot this week, but let's do it one more time.

The tradition that the minority party doesn't interfere with the majority's election of a Speaker is a strong one—and for good reason. Suppose, for example, that some moderate Republican had the support of 30 other Republicans. In other words, very fringe support. But then Dems threw all their votes to him and he won.

Do we really want to open up that kind of ratfucking as an acceptable norm? Both sides can play, after all. Think hard.

POSTSCRIPT: Maybe we do! It certainly presents some interesting possibilities. But if we go down this path, we should do it with our eyes wide open.

Just because I continue to think that a lot of people still don't get this, here are two charts showing wages and inflation. The first starts in 2019:

As you can see, every measure of wages has risen more than inflation. Now here it is over just the past year:

Once again, wages have outpaced inflation. The poor (light blue) and blue-collar workers (green) have done the best. But everyone has made gains.

You can cherry pick all you want. If you run this chart for 17.5 months or 26.3 months, it might show something slightly different. But the most obvious and natural measures both show the same thing: worker income has beaten inflation consistently. Not by a vast amount, which is probably all for the best with inflation at the top of the Fed's mind, but still up. Purchasing power has not suffered over the course of the pandemic to now.

POSTSCRIPT: I copied these charts straight off FRED just to make absolutely sure that nobody thought I was fiddling with things in my own charts.

This is not news, I know, but here are the concrete numbers:

As of mid-September, when this poll was in the field, Republican support for ongoing military aid to Ukraine had dropped to 50%. This doesn't augur well for "We're on your side, through thick and thin, forever."

“McCarthy mocked Biden’s age and mental acuity in public, while privately telling allies that he found the president sharp and substantive in their conversations — a contradiction that left a deep impression on the White House” https://t.co/w5RfmQpYYx

— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) October 4, 2023

This is the stained glass window in the Bayeux Cathedral. We were in Bayeux to see the famous Bayeux tapestry, which is more than 200 feet long and displayed in a ver-r-r-y long case. When we were done, I hopped over to the cathedral to look around, and then barely made it back to the tour bus in time to see the rest of Normandy.

This is truly great stuff from National Review's Noah Rothman:

On Tuesday night, the House Administration Committee delivered the news to former speaker Nancy Pelosi that she would have to vacate her “hideaway” office in the Capitol, a small chamber conveniently located closer to where the legislative action takes place. On Wednesday morning, onetime Democratic majority leader Steny Hoyer was ordered out of a similar hideaway he had occupied. Punchbowl News reporter Jake Sherman described the moves as an act of “revenge” against Democrats for voting unanimously with eight insurgent Republicans to remove McCarthy from the speakership. “Expect more of this, GOP sources tell us,” he warned.

More petty revenge. Roger that! But the best part is that Rothman defends petty revenge as a sound governing principle:

Democrats voted in lockstep with a faction of the conference that a majority of the majority desperately wants to punish. That’s a fraught prospect given the largely assumed influence the Right’s insurrectionary elements allegedly command among rank-and-file GOP voters, but meting out revenge against the Democrats who aided them isn’t nearly as difficult. This is what Democrats voted for.

NR went all in on the "Biden crime family" stuff a while ago, so perhaps this new look isn't a surprise. They are now fully committed to the Biden conspiracy theory and the lab-leak conspiracy theory, and they've always been committed to Benghazi and Tea Party targeting theories. I think they managed to avoid the "Obama was born in Kenya" conspiracy theory, but that's about it. They're pretty far down the rabbit hole these days, which is kind of sad for a publication that, notwithstanding my personal differences, has had a pretty distinguished history.

Anyway, back to office politics. Rothman and others need to be clear on the precedent here. Minority parties always vote unanimously against the majority party's candidate for Speaker. There are no exceptions. If Democrats had done otherwise, it would have been unprecedented.

So was unprecedented action called for? Let's roll the tape:

• Kevin McCarthy was one of the first Republicans to make a U-turn on the January 6th insurrection and deny that anything wrong happened.
• McCarthy negotiated a spending level of $1.59 trillion for discretionary programs during the debt ceiling standoff. Within days he reneged on that and demanded a much lower spending level.
• He did the same dozens of times, agreeing on some legislation or other and then immediately reneging under pressure from the MAGA wing of his party.
• He made a handshake deal with President Biden to provide more funding for Ukraine. Practically before he made it back to the Capitol he had reneged on that.
• He promised he wouldn't open an impeachment inquiry without a full vote of the House, and then did it anyway on his own.
• He took a bipartisan National Defense Authorization Act that passed 58-1 in the House Armed Services Committee and larded it up with right-wing poison pills that then passed only on a pure partisan vote and never had any chance of passing the Senate.
• At the end, McCarthy offered nothing to Democrats as a token of good faith and even said he didn't expect any of their votes.

McCarthy betrayed Democrats over and over and over. It's hard to see that they owed McCarthy anything, let alone that the circumstances were so unique that Democrats should have broken 200 years of tradition to interfere in the caucus matters of another party.

As a thought experiment, consider the opposite. Suppose 200 Republicans wanted to oust McCarthy and 21 wanted to keep him. But every Democrat voted for McCarthy, keeping him as speaker even though virtually his entire party didn't want him. Would that have been the right thing to do? Or should they simply let Republicans handle their internal issues?

The answer is obvious. And petty revenge is still petty revenge. It's stupid and spiteful and demonstrates a lack of either honor or integrity.