Author: Kevin Drum

This is Monet's lily pond. As you can see, there are no lilies blooming in this picture, so it's basically just a pond.

When you're on an eight-day cruise, it's inevitable that some of your tours will be on weekends. That was the case here, and Monet's garden was jammed—though you can't tell in this picture thanks to a strategic angle of view and a little bit of strategic photoshopping. I avoided the line (and some of the crowds) by spending half our allotted time walking around in Giverny and only about an hour at Monet's garden itself. And of course I avoided the cottage altogether (I've seen it before). In the end I only got two pictures worth keeping, and this is one of them.

It sure seems like it these days, doesn't it?

According to the latest numbers from the BLS, here are the cities where pay has increased the most over the past year:

Both the biggest and smallest pay increases seem to be scattered pretty equally around the country, so no interesting conclusions about this spring to mind. I will say that only in the yellow cities has pay even come close to keeping up with inflation. Every other city has seen a net pay decrease, and the red cities have seen a massive pay decrease.

I really wish that BLS offered a map like this with pay adjusted for inflation. They don't do this, however, so I added a second legend that at least gives you an idea using the national inflation number. It's likely that nearly every single metro area in the United States has seen a net pay decrease.

Well fuck you, Mark Zuckerburg:

Facebook and Instagram have begun promptly removing posts that offer abortion pills to women who may not be able to access them after a Supreme Court decision that stripped away constitutional protections for the procedure.

....Almost immediately, Facebook and Instagram began removing some of these posts, just as millions across the U.S. were searching for clarity around abortion access....In an email, a Meta spokesperson pointed to company policies that prohibit the sale of certain items, including guns, alcohol, drugs and pharmaceuticals. The company did not explain the apparent disparities in its enforcement of that policy.

Let's get real. You can get a gun on Instagram easily and they know it. And until Friday you could get abortion pills too, prescribed legally by a board certified medical doctor.

But now suddenly you can't because it's illegal in some states? There's no logic here except kowtowing to vengeful Republican politicians. What a bunch of weenies.

In his opinion in Dobbs, Sam Alito took great pains to say that nothing in it threatened any other rights. This was primarily because abortion kills an unborn child, which makes it unique.

Clarence Thomas disagreed, but he's always disagreed and no one joined him. So the question is, was Alito sincere, or was it merely a fiction he made up to make his opinion more palatable?

Progressives, needless to say, are convinced that conservatives on the Supreme Court are ready to begin striking down rights en masse, and I can hardly blame them for thinking so. But the best way to think about this is not speculation, but examination of actual conservative activism over the past few decades:

• They have spent the past 40 years loudly and unanimously opposed to abortion.
• The have also been unanimously in support of gun rights.
• And cutting taxes, especially for the rich.
• And suppressing Black voting because Black voters mostly support Democrats.
• And (a little less loudly and unanimously) opposing restrictions on campaign funding.

This makes both Dobbs and red state restrictions on abortion unsurprising. It makes Heller and the recent gun case, as well as red state laws on gun ownership, unsurprising. It makes the 2017 tax act unsurprising. It makes Shelby unsurprising. And it makes Citizens United unsurprising.

So what about the rights that liberals are concerned about?

• Republicans have not spent the past 40 years fighting contraception laws.
• Nor fighting interracial marriage.
• Nor, more recently, of fighting same-sex marriage, though they did fight it before Obergefell.

For this reason, I doubt that the Court will take on Griswold or Loving. The Supreme Court has always been sensitive to public opinion, and overturning these cases would simply be too much of a disaster.

Same-sex marriage is not on such sure footing. Its protection is more recent, for one thing, and although it was accepted remarkably quickly, there's still a lot of opposition to it among social conservatives. I'm not at all sure that the conservative justices have much motivation to take it on, but it's true that sending it back to the states would fit well with the reasoning in Dobbs.

Generally speaking, I'm more concerned with yet more action on the top list, not new activity on the bottom list. As usual, though, I could be wrong. The current set of conservative justices is a real shitshow.

It's time to tell you the final chapter of my drone story.

The reason I got the drone is because height is the photographer's best friend. At ground level, the perspective is lousy and there are always things in the way: trees, buildings, power lines, and so forth. The best perspective, oddly, is often from freeways, but those are frustratingly off limits for obvious reasons.

All of that got me thinking about drones, but the thing that finally tipped me over the edge was the LA skyline. For some reason I got the idea lodged in my head that I wanted to take a picture of the LA skyline at sunrise from the west. The problem is that the Westside is almost entirely flat, so there's no place to get a good angle. Here's the best I was able to do:

But a drone would fix that! So I got my little drone and started taking pictures. It worked like a champ:

Unfortunately, I needed to kill some time after taking these pictures, so I went out to Caltech, where I decided to fly the drone around and take a movie. But I wasn't very good at this and ran it into a tree. After examining the damage it was obvious that the camera was completely wrecked and not fixable.

I got a replacement, and then I went out to Louisiana. I had practiced more with the drone, but not enough. I was out at a swamp and . . . I flew the drone into a tree. I couldn't even retrieve it this time to examine the damage. It was either stuck in a tree or else it had fallen into the swamp. It was gone forever.

This time I decided not to replace it. I had gotten most of what I wanted to experiment with from aerial photography, and if I ever decide to get more serious about it I'll buy a bigger, better drone with a higher quality camera. That probably won't be any time soon, though. For now I'm droneless.

Over at National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty says he's surprised that progressive anger over the Dobbs decision has been relatively modest:

There were some loud marches through major cities over the weekend, but hardly the wave of riots, vandalism, and sacrilege promised by the group Jane’s Revenge. I think many of us prepared for our churches to be harassed over the weekend, only to come back Monday and see reports of a little graffiti at a crisis pregnancy center and the burning of an unused but historic church in Virginia.

I expected worse. And I suspect that the leak of the drafted Alito opinion stole some of the spontaneous energy from what could have been an explosive moment in public demonstration.

Dougherty obviously hasn't been reading the same Twitter feeds as me. I've seen plenty of anger.

But yes, the leak of the decision probably took away some of shock. And there's another thing too: Dobbs mainly affects red states, where state legislatures have already made abortion so difficult to get that it's been all but banned already. Conversely, it has no effect in blue states where legislatures have no intention of banning abortion. Hell, California has decided to strengthen abortion protections in response to Dobbs.

So if the response to Dobbs really has been modest, I'd propose several reasons:

• The leak.
• The laws already in place in red states.
• That fact that, in practical terms, there's little that progressives can do.

One of my guesses, by the way, is that Republicans are going to blow it. One of Dougherty's colleagues, for example, asks what's next?

Now that the Dobbs decision has come down, we must ask the question: What does final victory look like in a post-Roe country? It means an America in which abortion is not merely illegal — it’s unthinkable.

A large majority of Americans disapprove of Dobbs, and according to Gallup hardly anyone approves of a complete national ban on abortion. In fact, after the leak of Dobbs that went down seven points to 13% from an already low 20%.

The obvious conclusion is that Republicans should tread carefully. They got Dobbs thanks to a perfect storm of luck in Supreme Court appointments, and it's pretty unpopular. Pushing further would be really unpopular, but I'll bet they won't be able to help themselves.

A few days ago I showed you this chart:

This points to one of the most interesting ways of fighting the Supreme Court's abortion decision.

Abortion pills are approved by the FDA—a federal agency—and are nearly as safe as aspirin. A lot of experts think that it's impossible for a state to ban the use of a medication approved by a federal agency, and that would mean abortion pills are legal everywhere, regardless of a state's abortion laws.

But suppose that's not true. Or suppose the Supreme Court just arbitrarily rules that state law takes precedence. It's still the case that abortion pills are legal in lots of states, and there's nothing the Supreme Court can do about that.

So someone in California sets up a website that delivers abortion pills to anyone who wants them. That's legal in California, and there's no practical way of banning websites on a state-by-state basis. Someone presses a button, buys the pills, and they're delivered by the postal service. That's also a federal agency, and no state can intercept the mail and legally surveil it. Then you take the pills, and the next day you're no longer pregnant.

If everything is encrypted and the California folks don't keep records, it's hard to know what anyone could do about this in practice even if it were technically illegal.

Now, this isn't a panacea. Abortion pills are very, very safe, but occasionally they have side effects serious enough to demand a trip to the ER. That opens up the possibility of authorities figuring out what you did and prosecuting you.

More to the point, abortion pills don't work on all pregnancies. They're good only for the first 11 weeks. They don't work on ectopic pregnancies. And they're not recommended under certain circumstances.¹ All told, abortion pills are probably effective for about 90% of abortions.

So they aren't a perfect solution. But they sure make things a lot better, and they'd especially make things better if their cost were paid by some friendly billionaire. Another thing in their favor is that Republicans are scared stiff of even trying to prosecute women who get abortions. Doctors, sure, but not their patients. That's wildly unpopular and Republicans have always sworn they wouldn't do it.

¹According to WebMD, abortion pills are not safe for anyone who:

• Is too far into their pregnancy
• Has a pregnancy outside of their womb (also called an ectopic pregnancy)
• Has a blood clot disorder or serious anemia
• Has adrenal failure
• Is taking steroid medications long-term
• Takes any meds that could affect the drugs needed to end the pregnancy
• Has an IUD (intrauterine device) — a doctor would need to remove this first
• Is allergic to abortive medications
• Can’t get to an emergency room if needed
• Can’t see the doctor for a follow-up appointment

 

As usual, California leads the way:

On Monday, the Democratic-controlled Legislature gave final approval to a measure that would put [abortion] before the state’s voters, in the latest countermeasure aimed at the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade.

Senate Constitutional Amendment 10 by Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins (D-San Diego) would, if approved by voters, further codify the state’s already progressive reproductive rights, which grant anyone of reproductive age “the fundamental right to choose to bear a child or to choose and to obtain an abortion.” Currently, those rights in California are held up by case law and statutory laws, but Atkins said hostile attacks on abortion access convinced her those aren’t enough.

I believe this will pass. Legally, it's not clear to me how much difference it makes since Dobbs gives state legislatures supremacy on abortion regardless of whether the language is statutory or constitutional. But it might make a difference someday, so it's a good idea to get it down in black and white now, while the getting is good.

The chart below shows core inflation for both the US and Europe:

For the US I used the PCE price index excluding energy and food. For Europe I used Eurostat's HICP index excluding energy and unprocessed food. Since these are core inflation rates, they are unaffected by differences in oil spikes, Ukrainian food blockades, and so forth. This is just plain, underlying inflation.

The two markers show when core inflation first jumped more than half a point above its trendline. For the US that happened in April 2021. For Europe it happened in September 2021.

Given the timing, it seems likely that the initial surge in the US was prompted by the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which produced higher consumer spending for a few months before the flow of money stabilized. Then, in September, inflation surged again in both the US and Europe even though consumer spending was pretty flat. Given this, I would apportion the causes of core US inflation like this:

• Underlying inflation: 1.5%
• ARP: 2%
• Supply chains etc.: 1.5%

In Europe, it's more like:

• Underlying inflation: 1.4%
• Supply chains etc.: 3.8%

I've done this calculation a few times before using different data, but it always comes out about the same.

So here is my surprising conclusion: ARP has run its course, which is why core inflation has softened over the past couple of months. That will eventually leave us with core inflation of about 3.5%, which will decline as consumer spending eases and supply chains open back up.

Europe is a different story. They apparently handled supply chain issues considerably worse than we did, and that's pretty much the sole source of their surge in core inflation. It will not start to decline until they fix this.

In addition, both the US and Europe are suffering from an additional 3.6% inflation thanks to soaring food and energy prices. This is likely temporary, and in any case there's very little that policymakers can do about it.

Bottom line: Despite our endless whining about it, the US handled its supply chain issues pretty well. And while Joe Biden's spending package may have created some additional inflation, it was temporary and it gave the economy (i.e., actual American people) a boost when things looked bleak.

Europe, by contrast, appears to be suffering much worse from its handling of supply chains, and their economy is more sluggish than ours because we were more generous with stimulus spending (in March 2020, December 2020, and March 2021).¹ We might not have been perfect, but which place would you rather live in?

¹Europe didn't need as much stimulus thanks to its relatively strong safety net. Even so, they were too stingy with stimulus spending. In the end, this stinginess hurt their economic growth and didn't help them with inflation, which is currently higher than ours.