Kevin Drum

I'll confess that even I have a bit of inflation fatigue. But how about one more round? Today the BLS presents us with the latest figures for the Producer Price Index, which is basically wholesale prices. Here it is through June:

Although the overall PPI jumped a bit in June, it has been absolutely flat over the past year. It shows zero inflation in producer prices since last June. (Goods are down 4.4% over the past year. Services are up 2.3%.)

Since wholesale prices eventually feed into consumer prices, the plunge in the PPI has been leading the way for the drop in the CPI. It appears to still be on its way down, so it will almost certainly push even further declines in the CPI over the rest of the year.

Here is the full text of the ill-fated Equal Rights Amendment:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven ten years from the date of its submission by the Congress:

"ARTICLE —

"Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

"Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

"Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification."

The ERA was passed in 1972 and needed ratification from 38 states before its 10-year deadline expired. It got only 35. However, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Representative Cori Bush of Missouri have proposed a three-step strategy to declare that the ERA has, in fact, passed already and only needs to be recognized. It goes like this:

1. The 10-year deadline is part of the preamble, not the actual text of the Amendment, so it doesn't count.
2. During the Trump administration three more states ratified the ERA: Illinois, Nevada, and Virginia. That brings the tally to 38.
3. Six states have repealed their ratification, but there's no constitutional mechanism for doing that. Once ratified, always ratified.

This means that the required 38 states have legally ratified the ERA and the national archivist merely needs to announce it. Done and done.

But can it work? Gillibrand plans to introduce a joint resolution that codifies her theory, but Republicans will never support it:

Ms. Gillibrand conceded that she did not think Republicans would ever support the amendment, “largely because the pro-life movement has co-opted this argument,” she said. She said her hope was to compel Mr. Biden to call on the archivist to take action, or to change the filibuster rules in the Senate so that civil rights measures like the amendment would need only a simple majority — not 60 votes — to move forward.

This is doomed. Biden won't act unilaterally; the Senate won't pass an enabling resolution; and no court would back Gillibrand's plan.

“This is a political rather than a legal struggle,” said Laurence Tribe, the constitutional scholar and professor emeritus at Harvard Law School. “It would succeed only in a different environment than we have. It’s not going to pass. The real question is what political message is being sent. In a political environment like this, you throw at the wall whatever you can.”

If Gillibrand were a Republican making a weird new legal argument for something like, say, overturning the 25th Amendment as a Deep State coup, there's a tolerable chance the Supreme Court would stroke its collective chin, make up some shiny new doctrine, and rule in favor. But a Democrat with a weird new legal theory for a liberal cause? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Inflation is down. But there are doubters about the cause:

All it took for inflation to be transitory was 500bps of rate hikes and 7% mortgage rates.

— Conor Sen (@conorsen) July 12, 2023

Oh come on. This really doesn't bear much scrutiny. Here's inflation:

Even if you don't believe me when I say that it takes a year for interest rates to work through the economy and affect inflation—which to this day remains the general consensus of economists—you can't possibly believe that a quarter-point hike in March 2022 caused inflation to start declining in June. Inflation started coming down on its own, not because of anything the Fed did.

As for housing:

Mortgage rates did indeed skyrocket last year, but their effect on the housing market was surprisingly minimal. Housing under construction went up. From peak to trough, housing prices went down only 5%. The total value of residential construction went down about $100 billion—far too little to have much macroeconomic effect—and is still $200 billion above its pre-pandemic level.

Inflation went up mainly because of pandemic supply shocks and partly because we overdid federal stimulus a bit. There were also some temporary factors, like the Ukraine war and crop problems. When those subsided, so did inflation. The Fed has had almost nothing to do with it.

According to Rolling Stone, Rupert Murdoch is wavering in his support for Ron DeSantis:

In recent weeks, the Murdochs have grown increasingly displeased with the DeSantis campaign’s perceived stumbles, lackluster polling, and inability to swiftly dethrone Trump....According to two of the sources, Murdoch has privately winced at DeSantis’ nonstop cultural-grievance strategy, arguing that it is being executed sloppily.

Let me get this straight. Murdoch isn't especially concerned about DeSantis's ceaseless and repellent pandering to haters and the ignorant. He's only concerned that DeSantis isn't doing it very well.

Good to clear that up.

I don't know for sure how accurate this is, but it's certainly intriguing:

This comes from David Rozado, who says he used ChatGPT to "automatically label a longitudinal sample of 1.7 million headlines from 12 popular U.S. news media outlets."

If he's right, there was a big surge in pessimistic headlines in the late '60s and again around 2001, all against a backdrop of a steady increase ever since 1950. The two surges coincide with Vietnam and 9/11, but they never faded out. Headlines just reached a new level of pessimism and then kept increasing.

I'll spare you the long monologue, but I'm persistently befuddled about how pessimistic and angry and outraged so many people are these days. The headlines are just a symptom. My view is that anything even close to a clear look at things suggests that we are kicking ass these days. This isn't to say there are no problems—of course there are. There always are. We have climate change, COVID-19, declining life expectancy among the poor, and a war in Ukraine.

But the United States is the most powerful and dynamic country on earth, and it isn't even close. Our future is the brightest on the planet. Here in the US, economic growth is strong; incomes over time are up; poverty is down; social factors of all kinds are positive; democracy is strong despite the best efforts of Donald Trump and the MAGAnauts; fear of social media has almost no foundation in fact; technology is delivering marvels on practically a daily basis; crime is subdued; jobs are plentiful; and entrepreneurship is up.

But you sure wouldn't know it from our political discourse, which features two parties and a willing media that routinely portray every small setback as evidence the end times are nigh. It's maddening.

I've never liked having things in my ears, so on a whim I took advantage of Prime Days to buy a wireless "headphone" that fits around the back of your neck, curls over your ears, and produces sound via bone conduction.

They're great! The sound is good,¹ the stereo separation is excellent, and they fit snugly. If you too have never been comfortable with stuffing earbuds into your ears, I highly recommend them.

¹By ordinary standards, that is. I won't pretend to know how they stack up if you're an audiophile who demands only the best.

Here are two views of the Palace of Versailles. They show pretty vividly why I've never much liked it: it's one of the most boring piles of stone in Europe. What's more, I've never been a fan of formal French gardens, so I don't even like the gardens of Versailles that much. And I've never been there when the famous fountains were running, so I have no idea how impressive they might be.

As part of a historical narrative, Versailles is fascinating. As a place to visit, though, the truth is that it's mostly a long slog without much of a payoff.

Apparently everyone loves Monica Bertagnolli, Joe Biden's pick to run the NIH. Even Bernie Sanders likes her. But Bernie is miffed at Biden over some trivial issues related to drug pricing, so he's blocking her appointment.

The impasse is just one of several Biden has encountered with respect to his nominees....Biden’s pick to run the Labor Department, Julie Su, has seen her nomination founder for five months amid skepticism from a trio of senators. Nominees for both the Federal Aviation Administration and Federal Communications Commission withdrew this year after it became clear they couldn’t win confirmation. In May alone, Biden lost two judicial nominees. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), meanwhile, has singlehandedly halted the promotions of around 250 military officers, resulting in vacancies across the Pentagon.

I'm really sick of grandstanding senators who revel in personally grinding routine government business to a halt over their petty beefs and moronic pet peeves. Filibusters are bad enough, but unanimous consent is worse: it makes a running mockery of democracy by allowing a single person to jam things up even if the other 99 want to vote. It's long past due for the Senate to put an end to this idiocy.

Here is a mystery. Ever since the pandemic, Black men have been increasing their participation in the labor force. By March of this year they had increased their participation rate to match white men for the first time in history.

Then, in a single month, participation for Black men suddenly tumbled by 2.7 percentage points and never recovered. Everyone else showed (small) gains that month and ever since.

Unsurprisingly, the unemployment rate shows the same thing. In the past two months unemployment among Black men has suddenly surged from 4.5% to 5.9%. Everyone else has showed no change.

Now, all this does is put Black men back to exactly where they were before the pandemic: an overall labor force participation rate of about 68% and an unemployment rate of about 6%. Still, why the steady gains for three years followed by a plunge in April? What's going on?

In a few days we'll have some wage data for the second quarter, which will tell us if the decline in Black participation has been matched by a decline in Black wages. In the meantime, this is just something to ponder.

More Clarence Thomas weirdness today. His top aide, Rajan Vasisht, was responsible for collecting payments from guests to Thomas's annual Christmas party:

Vasisht’s Venmo account — which was public prior to requesting comment for this article and is no longer — show that he received seven payments in November and December 2019 from lawyers who previously served as Thomas legal clerks. The amount of the payments is not disclosed, but the purpose of each payment is listed as either “Christmas party”, “Thomas Christmas Party”, “CT Christmas Party” or “CT Xmas party”, in an apparent reference to the justice’s initials.

Almost all of the lawyers who made the payments are senior litigators at big law firms.

So . . . former Thomas clerks who are now senior attorneys were apparently being charged admission to Thomas's party. I don't know if that's illegal, but it's a little unusual, isn't it? Do people normally charge guests to come to a holiday party? Corrupt or not, Thomas sure is a weird dude.