Kevin Drum

Today brings another edition of Wall Street Journal Watch™. The topic this morning was people who have to work two jobs to stay afloat:

Sam Lalevee was scraping by in his job at a call center in Raleigh, N.C., when his rent jumped to $1,000 a month from $800. So he got a second job doing light and sound at a comedy club, joining a growing number of people who need more than one job to make ends meet in the postpandemic economy.

....The comeback of multiple-job holders speaks to some of the mixed currents in an economy that still boasts a growing job market, but has come with higher prices on a broad variety of goods and services, and essentials like rent and insurance.

The article is accompanied by this chart:

This is a badly designed graphic because they've insisted on starting the y-axis at zero. But put that aside. Technically speaking, nothing so far is actually wrong. The number of multiple jobholders has gone up since the start of the pandemic.

But in this case context is everything. Here's what things really look like:

The number of people with multiple jobs plummeted at the start of the pandemic and has now recovered to its old value. Over the long term, the number of multiple jobholders has declined steadily for the past 30 years.

Now, once you have this context you can decide for yourself what's really happening. You can correctly say (a) multiple jobholding has gone down substantially since 1994, (b) multiple jobholding flattened out around 2015, or (c) multiple jobholding dropped at the start of the pandemic and has now recovered.

What I think you can't do, if you're honest, is show just the last four years of this chart and then imply that the gig economy (or work from home or high unemployment or Bidenomics or...) is causing an unprecedented flurry of people getting second jobs in order to survive. That's just not the case.

I've finally gotten around to watching the entire CNN interview with Kamala Harris. For the record, it was half an hour long. It struck me as fairly ordinary, with Harris performing just fine. She didn't make any waves, but neither did she stumble or have trouble with any of the questions. Nor did she filibuster.

As usual among us political junkies, I was sort of stupefied that Dana Bash ended up asking about a grand total of four (4) actual policy issues: inflation, fracking, the border, and Israel. That's it.

However, I want to highlight one question in particular. Very early on Bash stated as fact that we have a "crisis of affordability." (There's that word crisis again!) This is flatly untrue. Since the start of the pandemic, wages have grown more than prices. It's common to believe that things are relatively more expensive than they used to be, but journalists should be in the business of telling the truth, not parroting mistaken perceptions.

Also worth a note: Bash seemed a bit incredulous when she asked Harris, "You maintain that Bidenomics is a success?" For the record, here are the most recent major economic readings in the US:

• Real GDP: Up 3.0%.
• Inflation: 1.9%.
• Unemployment: 4.3%
• Real wages: up 0.7% annualized since start of year.
• Stock market: up 18% since start of year.

Every one of these is either good or excellent. What's not to like?

Here are the 27 questions Bash asked:

1. What would you do on Day 1?
2. There's a crisis of affordability.... What do you say to voters who want to go back on the economy, when groceries were less expensive and housing was more affordable when Donald Trump was president?
3. The steps that you're talking about now, why haven't you done them already?
4. You maintain that Bidenomics is a success?
5. Do you still want to ban fracking?
6. In 2019 you said "There's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking." So it changed in that campaign?
7. What made you change that position at the time?
8. Was there some policy or scientific data that you saw that you said, "Oh, I get it now"?
9. You were tasked with addressing the root causes of migration.... Why did the Biden-Harris administration wait three and a half years to implement sweeping asylum restrictions?
10. About bipartisan border bill: You would push that legislation again?
11. In 2019, you raised your hand when asked whether or not border should be decriminalized. Do you still believe that?
12. How should voters look at some of the changes that you've made?... Is it because you have more experience now and you've learned more about the information? Is it because you were running for president in a Democratic primary? Should they feel comfortable and confident that what you're saying now is going to be your policy moving forward?
13. Will you appoint a Republican to your cabinet?
14. Anyone in mind?
15. Donald Trump suggested that you happened to turn Black recently for political purposes.
16. Would you withhold some US weapons shipments from Israel? That's what a lot of people on the progressive left want you to do.
17. No change in policy in terms of arms and so forth?
18. To Walz: You said you carried weapons in war.... A campaign official said you misspoke. Did you?
19. Did you misspeak?
20. You didn't use IVF.... Your campaign made false statements in 2006 about an arrest for drunk and reckless driving. What do you say to voters who aren't sure whether they can take you at your word?
21. To Harris: You were a very staunch defender of President Biden's capacity to serve another four years.... Do you have any regrets about what you told the American people?
22. When Biden called you and said he was pulling out of the race, what was that like? And did he offer to endorse you right away or did you ask for it?
23. And what about the endorsement? Did you ask for it?
24. So when he called to tell you, he said "I'm pulling out of the race and I'm going to support you"?
25. To Walz: I just have to ask you both about two standout moments.... Gus Walz saying, "That's my dad."
26. To Harris: Viral photo of your grand-niece watching your speech.... What does it mean to you?
27. Did she talk to you about it afterward?

Charlie would like you to please admire his lovely, furry tummy. Thank you.

What was the original idea behind Donald Trump's visit to Arlington Cemetery? Was it just intended as an excuse to bash Biden and Harris for not showing up? I don't know. But Fox News is sure making it seem plausible:

There was, of course, no Arlington "event." It was just Trump hauling in a camera to capture video of him grinning and doing a thumbs-up in front of a grave. It was campaign theater and nothing more—and Fox News knows it.

This whole episode keeps getting creepier and more disgraceful. These guys just don't know when to quit.

Welp, it only took 50 years, but here we are:

In a milestone breakthrough, more than half of Caltech’s incoming undergraduate class in the fall will be women for the first time in its 133-year history. The class of 113 women and 109 men comes 50 years after Caltech graduated its first class of undergraduate women, who were admitted in 1970.

When I was there in 1976, I lived in Ruddock House, population 100. If memory serves, that included five or six women. Add one per year and in half a century that ratio is about even. Time and persistence were all it took.

PCE inflation remained subdued this month, with both core and headline numbers right around 2%:

On a conventional year-over-year basis, headline PCE clocked in at 2.5% and core PCE at 2.6%.

I caught a few minutes of the commentary after CNN's broadcast of the Kamala Harris interview and got annoyed all over again by Scott Jennings blathering about "Biden's inflation." I realize that I'm going to convince approximately no one, but it wasn't Biden's inflation. It was Trump's inflation.

Our recent surge in prices was not a normal inflationary episode caused by loose monetary policy. Those affect inflation indirectly and take some time to work their way into the economy. Rather, it was caused by a combination of two things: (a) a sudden, sharp fall in supply due to the pandemic, and (b) the $3.5 trillion CARES Act, which made up for lost income and kept demand at normal levels.¹ This has a direct impact on inflation, so it can work its way into the economy in only a few months. Here it is:

The first little burst of inflation in mid-2020 might be related to the CARES Act but is probably just an artifact, making up for the huge decline a few months before. But by the end of the year inflation crossed the 5% level for good and kept going up. Eventually, however, supply normalized and the CARES Act wore off. By the end of 2023 inflation was down to nearly normal levels.

Now, I don't really think this is "Trump's inflation" either. The supply collapse was due to the pandemic and the CARES Act was massively bipartisan. It was the right thing to do, even if a brief surge of inflation was the price we paid. Nobody in Congress was thinking about it this way, but we had a choice between a big recession or a bout of inflation, and we chose the inflation. It's certainly what I would have done.

The whole world went through roughly the same thing, although other countries stabilized demand in other ways. And it ended the same way throughout the world, when the pandemic eased and supply surged back.

Like I said, I know this is a hopeless cause. The inflation got bad on Biden's watch, therefore it's Biden's inflation. That's as sophisticated as popular thinking gets. But it ain't so.

¹In addition, the Fed lowered interest rates and began quantitative easing. This gave things an additional push.

Josh Marshall says that Donald Trump's campaign event at Arlington Cemetery was even worse than you think:

The idea was to lay a wreath honoring the 13 members of the U.S. military who were killed during the evacuation of Kabul in 2021 and film a political ad. They would distribute the video and attack Vice President Harris and President Biden for not “showing up” for their campaign event, which they sought to portray was an established memorial.

Is this true? Josh doesn't cite a source, which was obviously deliberate. I wonder why? On the other hand, it sure sounds like something Trump would do, doesn't it?

The Trump team's response to being caught with their hands in the cookie jar has been pure Trump: Attack, attack, and attack harder. A Trump spokesperson berated the Arlington official who asked them to stop as having a "mental health episode." After the Army defended her, a Trump campaign advisor blasted them as a bunch of "hacks." Trump himself posted a campaign video of the event and then insisted that it wasn't a campaign event and that it was he who had been mistreated. And J.D. Vance furiously told Kamala Harris to "go to hell" even though she hadn't said anything.

Welcome to another day in the Trump campaign.

Here's another poll of swing states, this time from Bloomberg/Morning Consult:

This is even more optimistic than this morning's Emerson College poll, though note that the margin of error is about 4% in each state.

NOTE: We're close enough to the election that from now on I'll be reporting the results of likely voters whenever possible.

Donald Trump must be desperately afraid that abortion is going to lose the election for him. A few years ago he was so anti-abortion he said that women should be jailed for getting an abortion. But now?

First he announces that he's in favor of banning abortion only after 15 weeks. He promises not to enforce the Comstock Act. Then he writes on Truth Social that he'll be the best president ever for "women and their reproductive rights." Next his running mate promises that Trump will veto any attempt to ban abortion nationwide. Finally, today, he takes a page out of the Swedish socialist playbook:

Free IVF for all! How long will it be before he announces a billion-dollar funding program for Planned Parenthood?