Quits are up 6.6% (shows confidence about getting new job).
Layoffs are down 2.2%.
Aside from the drop in job openings, these are decent numbers. However, the longer term trends are all negative. Over the past year, job openings are down by 2 million. Hires have dropped 0.6 million. Quits have declined by 0.5 million. And layoffs have increased by 0.2 million.
None of this means a recession is in the offing. The trends aren't that bad. But it probably does mean that the economy is visibly softening.
Over at the New York Times, Jessica Grose urges us to be optimistic about vaccines even with nutballs like RFK Jr. running around badmouthing them. And she's right. Here's the latest CDC data for childhood vaccines:
Vaccine takeup has been generally flat or up for the past decade and showed no sign of slowing down during the COVID pandemic. The takeup rate for the combined 7-vaccine series increased from 69.8% to 70.1% between 2019 and 2021.
Takeup of the COVID vaccine has been (slowly but) steadily improving too:
Things are pretty flat, but in the US the vaccine rate went up half a point in early 2023 and is now safely over 80%. That's pretty solid.
On the bad news front, only about 40% of Americans have received a booster COVID dose, the lowest of any major country. On the childhood front, vaccine takeup is strongly related to insurance. Here are the rates for the 7-dose series:
Private: 78%
Medicaid: 64%
Other: 67%
Uninsured: 45%
In a country as rich as the US, there's really no excuse for this. Every kid should have easy access to every vaccine.
One day after a Louisiana federal judge set limits on the Biden administration's communications with tech firms, the State Department canceled its regular meeting Wednesday with Facebook officials to discuss 2024 election preparations and hacking threats.
....The canceled meetings show that the injunction is affecting government efforts to protect elections....“There is so much wrong with this decision — not least of all that it will make us less secure going into the 2024 elections,” wrote Yoel Roth, the former head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, in a social media post. Roth said the most glaring problem with the decision is that it asserts the companies were “coerced” to remove posts simply because they met with government officials. “That’s just … not how any of this works,” he wrote.
So no more meetings with Facebook and no more warnings of foreign election interference. We are shooting ourselves in our collective butts if we keep this up.
Everybody seems to have forgotten what Elon Musk's real problem with Twitter is. The wellspring of everything that's happened since last year was a single moment of stupidity in which he agreed to massively overpay for it. And it's not like he doesn't know this. He tried desperately to get out of the deal, and took over the company only after a court forced him to.
At that point he was stuck with a massively unprofitable business, so he laid off half the staff and then embarked on a series of hare-brained schemes to raise revenue. Some of these schemes have been dumber than others, and none of them have even remotely worked, but that's because nothing will work. I'm unable to conceive of any plan that would raise enough money to make Twitter a break-even proposition, let alone profitable. And the only alternative is to pump endless billions of personal dollars into it, not exactly an appealing proposition.
So, sure, Musk is destroying Twitter. But who wouldn't? I don't think there's a human being on earth who could fix Twitter. At best they could be a little less flaky about sending it down the drain, but that's probably all.
The state of Wisconsin allows the governor to eliminate parts of legislation he doesn't like using a line item veto. Today, Gov. Tony Evers vetoed a couple of digits and a hyphen from a two-year increase in the school budget. The original said this:
for the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year, add $325
After the vetoed digits it said this:
for 2023-2425, add $325
So it's now a 400-year increase. But this can't possibly be legal, can it? Could Evers carefully excise individual letters from a sentence to change, say, this:
no amount over $5,000 may be allocated above the governor's recommendation as fully authorized by appropriation
to this:
move $5,000 to the governor daily
That's ridiculous, right? You have to veto a provision, or at least a clause, not a bunch of individual letters. What's going on here?
UPDATE: It turns out this is not only legal but common. It makes no sense, but the story is here.
Who has the most new solar capacity? Obviously big states do. But what if you adjust for population and look at solar module shipments per capita?
It turns out it's mostly still the big states that are solar leaders: California, Texas, Georgia, and Illinois. But Nevada has them all beat by a mile.
Here are last night's fireworks. This year I decided to trek around to the far side of the lake and shoot with our (patriotically lighted) bridge in the foreground. Much hilarity ensued because my flashlight didn't work and I kept fumbling with the camera buttons. Eventually I got everything set right and captured a few good images. This is one of them.
The other recent Supreme Court case that I'm on the fence about is 303 Creative. In that one, Lorie Smith didn't want to create a website celebrating a same-sex marriage and the Court upheld her refusal.
In my initial post about it, I said the Court relied on a "thin distinction indeed": namely that while Smith was required to serve LGBT couples in her (virtual) shop she wasn't required to sell them whatever they wanted. But it is of such thin distinctions that case law is made.
Consider an ordinary shop that sells merchandise, not customized websites. It is full of Christian t-shirts and mugs and whatnot that celebrate marriage but none of the goods celebrate same-sex marriage. If a gay couple comes into the store, the owner is required to sell them anything they want whether he approves or not. That's public accommodation. But if the gay couple isn't happy with his selection of stock for sale? That's too bad. Nobody thinks the owner is obligated to carry any merchandise he doesn't want to.
Or try on for size another, more incendiary analogy. After the Civil Rights Act passed, the Supreme Court ruled in Heart of Atlanta that motels (and similar establishments) were required to serve customers of all races. This presumably extended to prohibiting certain kinds of speech too: a motel, for example, couldn't display a sign saying "No Negroes Allowed" as a way of discouraging Black customers even if, in the end, they'd cough up a room if they had to. At the same time, the owner of the motel also couldn't be compelled to say affirmatively nice things about Black customers if he didn't want to. Nor could he be forced to display a sign saying "Negroes Gladly Welcomed Here."
The parallel with 303 Creative is obvious, and it's one that Sonia Sotomayor persistently avoids addressing in her dissent. There's no question that Smith is required to serve on an equal basis any LGBT couple who shows up at the door. That's uncontested, and Sotomayor is eloquent and outspoken in insisting on this. But can Smith also be forced to affirmatively say things she doesn't want to just because a customer wants her to?
This is a far more subtle question. It goes without saying that I, personally, find it abhorrent that Smith is so narrowminded and cruel in her views. But my personal opinion has nothing to do with the law in this case. In the end, I think the Court probably got it right: This really is a fairly cut-and-dried First Amendment case, and Smith has the right to say—or not say—what she wishes. I don't like it, but the First Amendment is meaningless if I support it only for speech I like.
Earlier this morning I said there were two recent Supreme Court cases that left me conflicted. One of them was the decision that killed off the student loan forgiveness program, so let's take a closer look at that. The easiest legal argument in favor of allowing the program to continue is a simple syllogism:
The HEROES Act says the Secretary of Education may waive or modify "any" statutory provision of the student loan law.
Terms of repayment are a statutory provision of the student loan law.
Therefore, the secretary may waive repayment.
This is black letter law. What possible reason can there be for ignoring it? This leads us to the meaning of "waive or modify" and the question of just how expansive it is. Here, I think the majority opinion has a point when it says:
What the Secretary has actually done is draft a new section of the Education Act from scratch by “waiving” provisions root and branch and then filling the empty space with radically new text.
What is the limiting principle here? Could the Secretary literally abolish all payment of all student loans? Could he abolish all future payments too and essentially turn student loans into unrestricted grants? Could he refund all previous loan payments? For that matter, what stops him from abolishing the loans and then giving everyone $50,000 free and clear to make up for the hardship they've been caused in the past?
I know: this is ridiculous. And yet, the law contains no explicit limit on the Secretary's power, which means there must be an implicit one. But what?
There is now no further to go. The law is silent. As happens so often, Congress wrote some hazy statutory language without giving much thought to what it really meant or how much power they were giving up. So interpreting it becomes, literally, nothing more than a matter of opinion. The Court is forced to take a flyer at some kind of reasonable guess about how far Congress intended to go and what common sense implies.
It's possible the majority is mistaken. Their view might be too cramped. But before the loan forgiveness program was put in place, an awful lot of people—liberals and conservatives alike—thought it couldn't be implemented via executive order because that would have gone beyond the likely intent of Congress when it passed the HEROES Act. It's a close call, but it's hardly unreasonable to think the Court ended up on the right side of it.
The Washington Post has a devastating but deadpan story today about the efforts of a private equity firm to buy up anesthesiology practices all over the country and then jack up prices for everyone. It starts in Denver:
The multibillion-dollar private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe took less than a year to create, from scratch, Colorado’s biggest and most prominent anesthesiology practice.
The financiers created a company, U.S. Anesthesia Partners, which in 2015 bought the largest anesthesiology group in the Denver region. Then it bought the next largest. Then it bought a few more....The Federal Trade Commission, which is supposed to prevent unfair business practices, questioned the company’s growth but did not stop it.
The company raised prices for its services — one by nearly 30 percent in its first year in Colorado — and continued raising them for several years, according to interviews and confidential company documents obtained by The Washington Post.
And it's not just Colorado. It's also Texas. And Florida. Indiana. Maryland. Nevada. Tennessee. Washington. But the Post story is based on leaked documents about the Denver practice, so that's what the story is about. In short, practices were acquired. Rates increased. Doctors were tied up with noncompete clauses. Then their pay was cut and hours skyrocketed. The FTC looked into things but shrugged and did nothing. And once the acquisition spree was complete, it was time for phase two:
With its acquisitions, USAP had become the region’s preeminent anesthesiology practice, and it quickly sought to raise rates, according to documents. One page of an internal USAP company presentation labeled “Guiding Strategies” at the time listed 11 points.
“Accelerate rate increases,” said one. “Pricing +/-5% range, for market’s lead insurers,” said another....For patients insured under the Cofinity network, effective payment to USAP jumped 29 percent, according to the internal company documents. For patients covered by another insurer, Anthem, USAP rates would rise 17.5 percent in the first year the contract was up for renewal, according to the documents.
.....Another doctor group in Denver, Guardian Anesthesia, was charging United, a major insurer, about $75 per unit in 2020; when USAP won the contract at the hospital where Guardian had been operating, it charged about $125 per unit, or 66 percent more for services provided by the same anesthesiologists, according to the documents.
How much does it matter if Microsoft purchases Activision? Maybe some games will become exclusive to Xbox. Maybe not. It's hardly the world's most pressing concern, but it's getting overwhelming attention from the government and in the media.
At the same time, the real action is under the radar, where de facto monopolies are constructed by private equity firms all the time. They're a tenth the size of the Microsoft deal, but their impact is actually far greater: not just a few gamers here and there, but, in this case, every single person who has a hospital procedure in one of ASAP's territories. Maybe it's in situations like these that the FTC ought to do more than just ask a few questions and then leave.
None of this means a recession is in the offing. The trends aren't that bad. But it probably does mean that the economy is visibly softening.
