Author: Kevin Drum

Walgreens announced today that it planned to close 1200 stores. In case you think this is due to a recent wave of shoplifting, check this out:

Walgreens stock has been sliding for a decade, losing 90% of its value. This started shortly after they acquired the British chain Boots, which they've had difficulty integrating.

Shoplifting may be a problem at some Walgreens locations, but it's not why they're closing stores. That's happening for the most prosaic of reasons: Profits have been weak for years and were negative last year, mostly due to competition from Amazon and other online outlets. Walgreens is in the middle of attempting a turnaround and, as retail companies always do, is closing their least profitable locations as part of that. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

After a couple of people fainted at Donald Trump's town hall tonight, he got flustered and decided to give up and just play a bunch of his musical faves instead of continuing:

“Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” he said.

For 39 minutes, Trump swayed, bopped — sometimes stopping to speak — as he turned the event into almost a living-room listening session of his favorite songs from his self-curated rally playlist.

Here's the Washington Post's clip:

Trump did this for more than half an hour, just nodding at the audience as he swayed awkwardly to the music. What in God's name is going on with this man? He's crumbling practically hour by hour in front of our eyes.

The Wall Street Journal reports that fertility rates are down and countries around the world are desperately trying to bribe young adults to have more babies:

Imagine if having children came with more than $150,000 in cheap loans, a subsidized minivan and a lifetime exemption from income taxes.... These are among the benefits—along with cheap child care, extra vacation and free fertility treatments—that have been doled out to parents in different parts of Europe, a region at the forefront of the worldwide baby shortage.

....Europe and other demographically challenged economies in Asia such as South Korea and Singapore have been pushing back against the demographic tide with lavish parental benefits for a generation. Yet falling fertility has persisted among nearly all age groups, incomes and education levels.

....Orsolya Kocsis, a 28-year-old working in human resources, knows having kids would help her and her husband buy a larger house in Budapest, but it isn’t enough to change her mind about not wanting children. “If we were to say we’ll have two kids, we could basically buy a new house tomorrow,” she said. “But morally, I would not feel right having brought a life into this world to buy a house.”

In the past, declining fertility has been due to an active desire to have fewer children. But Lyman Stone argues persuasively that over the past 20-30 years desires have remained fairly stable. So why the decline in actual fertility? Stone says it's all about marriage:

If you're not married, you're way less likely to have kids, even if you want them:

Women who get married are overwhelmingly more likely to achieve their childbearing ideals and expectations, both in cross-sectional data and in panel data.... While policies oriented towards subsidizing childbearing may help to some extent, the reality is that no policy intervention is likely to produce durable results if women don’t spend more of their fertile years in marriages that are open to children.

I've never thought fertility was affected much by money. Poor people have always had as many kids as rich people—maybe more. So all these schemes to reward people for having more children were bound to fail.

Of course, it's equally fruitless to bribe people to get married. So even if Stone is correct we're no closer to a solution. My guess is that we need a better class of men so that marriage is worth it. But I don't know how to get that either. Any ideas?

Conservatives are in endless denial about their own movement:

The "planted disinfo" in question is a nutbag conspiracy theory from a Twitter troll called Black Insurrectionist. He's the guy who last month circulated an obviously fake claim from a "whistleblower" that the ABC presidential debate had been rigged for Kamala Harris. Now he's back:

This time, Black Insurrectionist says he received an anonymous email on August 9 from someone claiming they’d been sexually assaulted as a minor by Tim Walz. “I did indeed call the person making the claims,” Black Insurrectionist wrote. “He laid out a story that was very incredulous. I told him he would need to lay everything out in writing for me. In depth and in detail.” Black Insurrectionist included a screenshot of the purported first email; as thousands of people immediately noted, the image had a cursor at the end of the last sentence, making it obvious that he’d written it himself.

Undaunted, Black Insurrectionist went on to post dozens of tweets outlining the claim, including relaying another written “statement” from the victim claiming that Walz has a “raised scar” on his chest and a “Chinese symbol” tattooed on his thigh.

Black Insurrectionist knows his audience. He understands that the MAGA crowd will believe literally anything juicy, no matter how ridiculous it is. It will generate attention and clicks and advertising dollars as long as he keeps up the scam. This is what Donald Trump has taught his followers.

But no. Eli Lake agrees with the loathsome Jack Posobiec that Kamala Harris (a) hired an actor who would pretend to be a molestation victim, (b) decided to funnel this fake story through Black Insurrectionist, (c) all for some unfathomable reason. I mean, what's their theory here for the endgame? That Walz will triumphantly strip down and show everyone he has no tattoo on his thigh, thus destroying the credibility of Black Insurrectionist?

Guys, the real story is simple: your movement is brimming with liars, crackpots, grifters, charlatans, and conspiracy theorists, all feeding the vast maw of credulous Trump followers. That's it. That's all there is.

In the current issue of Texas Monthly Jack Herrera has a top notch story about illegal immigration in Texas. After a portrait of a Honduran migrant who's chased away from home by rising gang violence and is desperate to land a construction job in the US, he writes about the main reason for the recent spike in border crossings—one that I've also tried to highlight:

Arguably the most important factor—one too rarely considered—is the interplay of supply and demand. In 2021, as the pandemic began to ease, “We’re Hiring” signs started to appear in the windows of businesses across the U.S. Acute labor shortages hobbled entire industries, interrupting supply chains and fueling inflation. In response, a record number of workers crossed the southern border.

Hererra then focuses specifically on worker shortages in Texas's booming construction business:

The deficit in construction is historic, by some measures.... Texas building executives are speaking in apocalyptic terms about the labor shortage they’re still facing. Behind closed doors, they bluntly acknowledge that countless new projects won’t get off the ground unless they hire workers who are in the country illegally.

....The industry also faces a labor-force problem it cannot address quickly simply by raising pay. For two decades, the number of U.S.-born workers entering the construction trade has nosedived.... Cutting off the supply of undocumented workers, then, would be like cutting off the supply of concrete and lumber.

....Whenever Texas politicians threaten to pass laws that would make it harder for businesses to employ undocumented workers, phones in the Capitol start ringing. Stuck with the need to show their base that they’re cracking down on migrants, politicians, including [Governor Greg] Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants and jobs in the state’s interior.

Herrera's main takeaway is that Texas politicians deliberately do things that get public attention—Project Lone Star, high profile disputes with the feds, busing immigrants to New York—but that won't make a dent in the numbers. That's because the business owners who really control Texas politics won't abide anything that actually works. So the charade continues.

In 2017, after Donald Trump first moved into the White House, his acting ICE chief, Thomas Homan, declared that he intended to increase worksite enforcement by “four hundred percent.” He largely succeeded. By the end of 2018 ICE had quadrupled investigations of undocumented workers, and agents had arrested seven times as many immigrants in workforce raids compared with the year before.

But one metric stayed virtually static: the number of managers arrested for hiring undocumented immigrants. In 2019 the Associated Press reported that convictions of managers who hired workers without legal status had even declined.

Williams made an argument I heard from Marek and others: that the government doesn’t have an interest in shutting down construction projects, which is what would happen if it required contractors to hire only legal workers. Of all the immigration-related crimes to prosecute, why go after those building the houses the country so badly needs?

It's not just construction, of course. And there's an obvious solution: mandatory E-Verify and real penalties for employers who violate it. But precisely because it would work, Republican business donors oppose it and Republicans, therefore, aren't much interested in it.

The simple truth is that there aren't enough legal residents to fill all the jobs in the US. Everyone knows this. When Donald Trump thunders about deporting every illegal immigrant in the country, it's just empty talk, red meat for the rubes. In reality, our economy would collapse without immigrants, and no one wants to risk that. So we continue appealing to xenophobia with walls and agents and raids, but it's all theater. As Herrera notes, it's just enough to keep illegal immigrants scared and exploitable, but always stops carefully short of making any meaningful dent in their numbers. Quite the coincidence.

I'm going to keep trying with the comet, but it's just too faint to capture well. I took this one at the Huntington Beach pier, just before the comet dropped below some developing fog and disappeared. This is a composite picture since I needed a long exposure for the comet but a shorter exposure for the pier. It's also been processed to within an inch of its life and it's still barely visible. I never saw it with my naked eye even though the preview photos told me exactly where it was.

In a couple of days maybe I'll try again in a darker spot.

Kamala Harris introduced an economic plan today designed to help Black men, but as you might expect it's really a laundry list of stuff that will be available to anyone. She's just pitching it as aimed at Black men.

Anyway, this buries the lede:

Under the plan, Ms. Harris also pledges to legalize marijuana nationally and to ensure that Black men, who were once disproportionately jailed for using and distributing marijuana, can benefit from its business potential.

This is pretty big news, no? It's oddly MIA in the headlines of news stories about this.

Here is the Atlanta Fed's latest projection for real GDP growth in Q3:

Donald Trump beat 3% growth only five times before COVID hit. Joe Biden beat it seven times in his first three years. This will be his ninth overall.

Likewise, GDP grew a total of 8.2% during Trump's first three years and 7.1% overall. It grew 9.0% during Biden's first three years and is on track to grow 12% by the time his term ends.

The Washington Post has heroically scoured campaign finance reports to figure out what politicos of different parties like to eat:

Fast food in general appears to be a Republican thing: Overall, GOP campaigns outspent Democrats about 18-to-1 at fast-food joints of all stripes.

As best I can tell, Republicans outspent Democrats about 2:1 on food in general. So the relative fast-food divide is probably really around 9:1. That's still a lot!

This is probably not just a coincidence. Here is the very first comment on the article:

Real democrats like me don’t eat sugary and fatty fast food. We understand the externality associated with obesity. I’m still ashamed of urban Democrats for feeding their kids fast food and making them obese.

The rest go on and on and on in this vein. We liberals really are a pain in the ass, aren't we?

This is nuts:

The new round of October polling from the Senate Leadership Fund shows all but one Republican candidate running behind Donald Trump in battleground states.

Trump is more popular than conventional Republicans. Republican voters actively prefer a lying, ignorant, whining, vengeful racist to an ordinary person with conservative views.

I guess we already knew this since Trump won the Republican primary handily, but still. Do any Republicans watch his rallies and understand just how far he's melted down since he was president? Or do they really prefer lying, ignorant, whining, vengeful, and racist to ordinary?