It's funny that SNAP (food stamps) and WIC (Women Infants and Children) grow and shrink differently over time. SNAP responds to the economy, growing during recessions when it's needed most and then falling when the economy improves and it's needed less. It declined during the expansion of the aughts but then increased by nearly 20% during the pandemic.
WIC, by contrast, doesn't respond to the economy at all. It grew steadily through 2009 and has declined ever since. It didn't grow during the Great Recession and didn't even grow during the pandemic years. It's now 30% smaller than it was in 2010.
Any explanations for this? Does it have something to do with the way these two programs are funded?
Threads may have signed up 100 million users in its first week, but that doesn't mean 100 million people are actually using it:
Generally speaking, everyone seems to agree that lack of features is the main reason for the drop in engagement. It's certainly the reason I haven't signed up in the first place. Threads is pretty useless to me until they release a browser client, since I'm not going to fat-finger my way through a phone interface. Beyond that, I have little interest in an app that decides for itself which posts to show me. A bare minimum requirement is that I can follow whoever I want.
I can only assume that lots of people agree about the lack of critical features. Either that or they find Threads terminally boring. I'm not sure which would be worse.
The town of Burney in northern California has suffered a recent bout of vomiting and stomach illness due to an outbreak of e. coli in the water supply. The LA Times fills us in:
Everyone is struggling to get through their days without potable water as the local water district works to treat the source of the problem. Restaurants that rely on tourists have shut their doors.
It is yet another example of the vulnerability of rural California’s water systems. Many of the state’s failing water systems are in the Central Valley, where water is drawn from wells that are contaminated with nitrates, or that have run dry because of years of drought and overpumping of groundwater.
According to the CDC, here is how California's water systems have fared over the past half century:
Until Burney, there hasn't been a single waterborne disease outbreak in California since 2017. How hard is it to look this up and realize that California's water systems apparently aren't all that vulnerable after all?
This is downtown Los Angeles at night viewed from Angeles Crest Highway. City Hall is off to the left. There's a thin marine layer settling in south of downtown, with the lights of Long Beach behind it and then yet another marine layer over the ocean.
April 8, 2023 — Angeles National Forest, California
Last night I posted a chart showing the relationship between interest rate hikes and subsequent changes in the unemployment rate. I got some pushback because the data was so noisy it seemed like the relationship was made up. To clarify things, here's a smoothed version of the chart that uses rolling 6-month averages:
Apologies for how busy this chart is. The blue line shows every single time long-term interest rates have been pushed up by two percentage points or very close to it. There are six instances, and in one of them (1995) nothing happened. In four of them unemployment started to increase 6-18 months later. The final one happened earlier this year.
There's no cherry picking and no noise. Unemployment and recession follow interest rate hikes by about a year. I expect the same thing to happen this time.
Temecula, California, is not MAGA country. It's wine country, sort of rural but not very, and is generally moderately Republican. Donald Trump won 53% of the vote in 2020.
And yet, Temecula is currently ground zero for a furious backlash against a fifth-grade history textbook because it includes optional supplementary material that mentions gay activist Harvey Milk, who was assassinated in 1978. This has prompted spittle-flecked fury among ultra-conservative school board members against both the textbook and Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is forcing them to use it:
They painted Newsom — who plans to send textbooks that reference Milk to Temecula students in defiance of the board — as a “tyrant” who “forces his rule” upon a district he knows nothing about. They called lessons about LGBTQ+ history “pornographic” and “obscene.”
....Conservative school board President Joseph Komrosky, who called Milk a “pedophile” and has been publicly feuding with Newsom over the issue, asked sheriff deputies on Tuesday to remove a teacher from the meeting after she called conservative board member Danny Gonzalez a “homophobe.”
Without evidence, Gonzalez said that proposed instruction would promote pedophilia and said he opposed teaching about the gay liberation movement that began in the 1960s because it’s “not appropriate to discuss sexuality.”
As I mentioned the other day, this is what happens when conservatives take control of school boards. It's always the extremist crackpots who end up in charge, pushing insane conspiracy theories about "obscene" content and "pedophiles" being foisted on our children.
In reality, this is just some optional material about gay rights, something that none of the initial reviewers even bothered mentioning, let alone objected to. As for the kids themselves, I doubt they're fazed by this stuff even slightly. They probably know all about it already.
I didn't realize this until I saw it this morning, but if you exclude California homelessness has been steadily declining in the US since 2007. It's down by a quarter over the past 15 years:
You'd never know it from media and activist reports, but homelessness has been a big policy success in 49 states. As usual, though, California is the great outlier when it comes to anything housing related.¹ Policy recommendations should always take that into account.
Today I learned, via the Washington Post, that several blue states have made it legally possible to ship abortion pills to women in states where they've been outlawed:
A new procedure...allows U.S. medical professionals in certain Democrat-led states that have passed abortion “shield” laws to prescribe and mail pills directly to patients in antiabortion states....The telemedicine shield laws, enacted over the past year in New York, Massachusetts, Washington, Vermont and Colorado, explicitly protect abortion providers who mail pills to restricted states from inside their borders.
....In less than a month, seven U.S.-based providers...have mailed 3,500 doses of abortion pills to people in antiabortion states, according to Aid Access, putting just this small group alone on track to help facilitate at least 42,000 abortions in restricted states over the next year.
....Some lawyers say these doctors could face repercussions, even if they steer clear of traveling to states in which abortion bans call for prosecuting abortion providers....[Julie] Kay said that traditional extradition laws would be difficult to apply in these circumstances. “One state can extradite if a person commits the crime in the state, then flees,” Kay said. “But no one is fleeing here. You are just sitting in your office in New York.”
It turns out that having a makeshift network of doctors do this is just a temporary stopgap. The pills are actually supplied by a pharmacy in California, which will be able to ship directly to customers as soon as California enacts its own shield law—which should be soon. SB345 easily passed the state Senate several weeks ago and is close to passing in the Assembly. It should be signed into law by the end of August.
I'm feeling a little bored so I'm going to do something foolish: make a prediction. In particular, I'm going to make a prediction about the economy.
As most of you know, my view of the economy has always been resolutely boring and conventional:
In response to inflation, the Fed raises interest rates.
A while later long-term interest rates go up.
A while after that the economy slows and unemployment goes up.
In the current case, the Fed started raising rates in March 2022. Long-term rates hit a new peak around January 2023. If history is any guide, it takes about a year for the economy to respond to higher long-term rates, which means that things will start to slow down around December 2023. Here's a historical chart showing the way unemployment usually starts to rise about 12 months after long-term rates have climbed to a new peak:
There's nothing precise about this. Unemployment generally starts to go up about a year after long-term rates have hit a new peak, but not always. It might happen sooner. Sometimes there's no response at all.
Nevertheless, the increase in long-term rates has been fairly sharp and fairly large this time around, and I'd be pretty surprised if the economy didn't respond in a fairly conventional way. This may seem like a leap of faith based on invisible forces, but those forces are out there burrowing away whether you can see them or not. They're already baked into the cake, and the only real question left is the exact timing and size of the response, not whether there will be a response. Of course there will be.
This is a doctor making his way from Medical Office Building 1 to Medical Office Building 2 at my local Kaiser Permanente hospital. I've spent many an hour whiling away the time in MOB 2.
Any explanations for this? Does it have something to do with the way these two programs are funded?
