Kevin Drum

This is from the 2022 American Family Survey:

I wonder what Republicans really think about this? If they're serious about the cause not being spending bills passed by Congress (stimulus, CHIPS Act, infrastructure, the Inflation Reduction Act), what exactly is left to blame on "Biden administration policies"? It is a mystery.

Why is core inflation (i.e., underlying inflation not affected by food and energy) so high? Most analysts cite three reasons:

First, there's high government spending, especially from the January 2021 stimulus bill. But that's back to normal:

Second, there was increased consumer demand after the COVID-19 pandemic settled down. That was a problem in 2021, but this year wages are down, savings are down, and therefore (unsurprisingly) spending is flat:

Third, there are ongoing supply chain problems. But according to the New York Fed's supply chain stress index, that's mostly gone away:

So what's left? We already know the housing market peaked earlier in the year and is now declining. The money supply has been flat since the start of the year. How about greedy multinational corporations?

I'd love to blame inflation on corporations, but it's hard to do. Pretax profits are right on the pre-pandemic trendline and they've been dead flat over the past 12 months. But maybe there's an asset bubble in stocks?

Even the stock market is back on trend, and it's down a whopping 24% since the start of the year.

Maybe it's now at the point where it's purely about inflationary expectations? That's possible, but even the one-year estimate from the Cleveland Fed is only up to 4%, which suggests that investors think headline inflation will be cut in half within a year. And the ever-reliable 5/5 breakeven rate is only slightly above its pre-pandemic trend and has been flat at about 2.4% for more than a year:

I'm stumped. If inflation is really a long-term problem that's so entrenched it can only be fought by putting a million people out of work, surely there must be some deep and profound cause. But what is it?

I was up all night doing astronomy stuff and forgot to post a lunchtime photo today! In order to restore the proper clockwork of the universe, here's a photo of young French lovers on the Paris metro actually taken around lunchtime. That's a rare thing for lunchtime photos.

Maggie Haberman has been covering Donald Trump forever, and for four years she covered him in the White House for the New York Times. Naturally she wrote a book after he left office, and lefties have been up in arms about the fact that she revealed things which perhaps should have been revealed at the time they happened instead of waiting a couple of years.

I didn't really follow this whole kerfuffle, vaguely chalking it up to the fact that lots of lefties hate Haberman for being too soft on Trump. But over the weekend I got into a Twitter conversation that got me curious about the whole thing, so I checked to see what her precise offense was. Here it is:

Former President Donald Trump repeatedly told aides in the days following his 2020 election loss that he would remain in the White House rather than let incoming President Joe Biden take over, according to reporting provided to CNN from a forthcoming book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

“I’m just not going to leave,” Trump told one aide, according to Haberman.

That's it? Sure, this would have been slightly more interesting around the time of the January 6 insurrection, but only slightly. On the list of Trump braggadocio and inanity over his four years as president, I'm not sure this even makes the top 100. On this list of "bonkers revelations" it only rates #7 in the book.

On the Kevin scale, this rates four mehs.

The Washington Post has yet another story today about the calamitous shortage of US public school teachers in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. It starts off with the headaches faced by Carolyn Stewart, the superintendent of the Bullhead City School District in Arizona:

The 2,300 students in her district had been back in school for several weeks, but she was still missing almost 30 percent of her classroom staff. Each day involved a high-wire act of emergency substitutes and reconfigured classrooms as the fallout continued to arrive in her email. Another teacher had just written to give her two-week notice, citing “chronic exhaustion.”

....Stewart had been working in some of the country’s most challenging public schools for 52 years, but only in recent months had she begun to worry that the entire system of American education was at risk of failing. The United States had lost 370,000 teachers since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Maine had started recruiting summer camp counselors into classrooms, Florida was relying on military veterans with no prior teaching experience, and Arizona had dropped its college-degree requirement.

Just to start off, I don't doubt for a second that Stewart is having trouble hiring teachers in her high-poverty school district out in the middle of the Mojave Desert. I wouldn't be surprised if they have hiring problems every single year. But Bullhead City is just one school district, so let's check the national statistics quoted in the story:

Spot on! The current number (for August 2022) is 370,000 less than the number for January 2020.

But there's a problem here: this number is for all education employees, fewer than half of whom are classroom teachers. The actual shortfall is closer to 160,000. And there's more: you really need to compare this to the number of K-12 students over the same period. Here it is:

The number of teachers is lower than it was before the pandemic, but so is the number of students. In other words, while there might really be a shortage of teachers, you have to account for the decline in the number of students to put a real number on it. And that's pretty easy. The teacher-student ratio (the gray bars) is currently 14:1 compared to 13.7:1 in 2019. A bit of simple arithmetic tells us that in order to get back to the teacher-student ratio we had before the pandemic we'd need about 70,000 more teachers.

So the real shortage is less than a quarter of the raw number quoted in the story. If Arizona is similar to the rest of the country, it's probably short about 1,500 teachers, or less than one per school.¹

If you cherry pick, you can find plenty of schools—or entire districts—that are well above that average. Bullhead City sounds like one of them. But overall, the United States K-12 system is not at risk of failing.

Not from raw numbers of teachers, anyway. If you want to make the case that the problem is dire for some other reason—for example, schools trying to handle both remote and in-person teaching until they're fully in-person again—that's fine. Make your case. But let's at least get our sums right when we do it.

¹The United States as a whole has about 95,000 public K-12 schools. If we're short 70,000 teachers, that's an average of 0.74 teachers per school.

I guess we're followers this time, not leaders, but as of 2023 jaywalking will no longer be against the law in California—as long as you do it safely:

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday signed the “Freedom to Walk” bill sponsored by Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco). The law, which goes into effect on Jan. 1, comes years after activists have argued that jaywalking rules disproportionately affect marginalized and low-income residents.

Under the new law, pedestrians would be able to legally cross the street outside of designated intersections without the threat of a hefty citation “unless a reasonably careful person would realize there is an immediate danger of collision with a moving vehicle or other device moving exclusively by human power.”

It sounds like woke activists were mostly responsible for this burst of common sense, not pedestrian interest groups. So let me be the first to say thanks to California's marginalized and low-income folks—and the cops who hassle them—for providing the excuse to pass this law.

The New York Times reveals why the Supreme Court has become so distrusted of late:

The actual cause of its historic unpopularity is no secret. Over the past several years, the court has been transformed into a judicial arm of the Republican Party.

Yep. The modern Republican Party consists of three branches: the Supreme Court, Fox News, and Donald Trump. Congratulations to SCOTUS for its official entry into this triumvirate.

Charlie Cooke really really doesn't like President Biden's student loan forgiveness program:

“I consider this to be a constitutional crisis,” he said. “I think that from start to finish, we are witnessing a president test the established legal order of the United States. . . . His broader party know that he’s not allowed to. But he went ahead and willfully did it anyway.”

These vast, sweeping changes are deeply out of line with our Founding documents. “To go back to first principles,” he says, “this is why we have a Congress. This is why we don’t have a dictatorship. Nothing we have seen from the Biden admin in the last two months related to this executive order would’ve been different in a dictatorship. Every decision’s been executive.”

Joe Biden, dictator!

This is the same schtick conservatives pulled on President Obama and it's equally ridiculous this time around. Is the student loan program unconstitutional? I doubt it, but it's possible. And if it is, the Supreme Court will say so and the program will be revoked.

This happens All. The. Time. Presidents push the boundaries of their authority. The Department of Justice backs them up with legal opinions. The opposition takes them to court. The court then rules one way or another.

Conservatives screamed for years about DACA, the Obama executive order that gave dreamers (kids who were brought across the border to the US at a young age) an across-the-board approval to work, go to school, and avoid deportation. Tyranny! But nothing stopped conservatives from suing—which they did—and they found a friendly district judge in (of course) Texas to rule in their favor and block an expanded version of DACA. The law then meandered through the court system, going up and down to the Supreme Court a couple of times but staying partially alive. Conservatives kept on going, though, and now that Joe Biden is president he responded in the usual way: he appealed. He'll probably lose that appeal and then move on to the Supreme Court. They'll either approve DACA; strike it down; strike it down partially; or send it back to a lower court. Some tyranny.

So let's cut out the dictator talk unless you have serious grounds for it. If the Supreme Court eventually rules against DACA, the Biden administration will obey the court and cancel it. That's how a democracy works. There are no jackbooted thugs on our doorsteps.

The Wall Street Journal, like all of us, is puzzled by the economy. Why is it that even though economic growth is flat, companies are still trying to hire more workers?

A persistent economic puzzle is why labor is still so tight amid slowing growth....Monthly payrolls have grown an average of 438,000 from January through August, nearly three times their 2019 prepandemic pace. Many employers say they continue to struggle with large staffing shortages that built up during the pandemic and are reluctant to cut head count.

This got me curious: which industries are back to their old employment level and which are still struggling to restaff? Here's the answer:

Keep in mind that January 2020 was the peak of a 10-year expansion cycle and represented full employment virtually everywhere. We're now recovering from another recession and there's no special reason to think employment should already be higher than it was at the very end of the last recovery.

But it is. Total employment is half a million higher than it was before the pandemic, and this recovery includes virtually every individual industry. The only real exceptions are restaurants and hotels, which are 300-400,000 short of their pre-pandemic numbers, and government, which is 500,000 short.

And there's only one (1) industry that's substantially below its pre-pandemic employment in both percentage and absolute terms: hotels. That's it.

So this makes things even more puzzling. With the exception of hotels, there are no industries that are really hurting right now. And yet it seems like all of them are complaining. What's going on?

Charlie isn't the only cat around here who likes to hide in the backyard bushes. Hilbert likes it too, but he has a harder time since he's bigger and less camouflaged than Charlie. Plus, to be honest, he doesn't seem to be trying really hard, does he?