Kevin Drum

Today the Census Bureau released construction spending numbers for May. As usual for the past two years, nonresidential construction spending was down:

More interestingly, residential construction spending is down for the first time since mid-2020:

I imagine this is just the start of a longer turndown in housing. But it probably won't be severe. I hope.

Hilbert saw a newspaper tossed into the sink and immediately knew he had to curl up on it. The fixtures even match his eyes. It's a match made in heaven.

Tyler Cowen points us to this chart:

"Psychological distress," according to the author, is defined as scoring ≥ 5 on the Kessler-6 Distress Scale, which is administered as part of the National Health Interview Study.

As you can see, distress has been rising steadily for the past two decades. It has risen for all age groups, genders, races, and educational levels. Distress is higher among women than men, and also higher among those without a college degree compared to college grads. But the rise in distress rates has been the same for everyone.

Why? The author reports the results but doesn't attempt to explain them. Personally, I would like to know if distress levels were flat until 2000 and then started increasing. But the data doesn't go back far enough to tell us.

Beyond that it's guesswork. Since most objective measures of well-being have been either flat or improving over the past 20 years (yes, really), my guess is that rising distress is related to political polarization and Fox News. But you knew I was going to say that, didn't you?

The Klondike bar is 100 years old, and CNN is here to misinform us about it:

You don't hear about many products getting cheaper over time, but technically at least, people can pay less for a Klondike bar today than they did 100 years ago. When it first came out, in 1922, the Klondike bar cost just 10 cents, the equivalent of $1.75 in 2022 dollars. A six-pack of the original bars costs about $4 today — or 67 cents each.

Oh stop it. Practically everything has gotten cheaper over the past century. And the Klondike bar isn't "technically" cheaper, it's absolutely, concretely, totally for real cheaper. In 1922, the average worker's salary could buy 15,000 Klondike bars a year. Today, the average worker can buy 80,000 Klondike bars per year. That's progress, my friends.

Consumer spending growth was flat in May:

After huge spikes due to the pandemic and its rescue packages, consumer spending growth now appears to have settled down to its normal, pre-pandemic rate of about 2%.

This means that spending isn't driving inflation higher. Wages aren't driving inflation higher. Home prices are no longer driving inflation higher. Rescue packages aren't driving inflation higher. And federal deficits aren't driving inflation higher:

So where is the threat of future inflation coming from?

Big news from the Wall Street Journal!

But how long has this Twitter holiday been? Inquiring minds want to know and the Journal is here to tell us:

The billionaire chief executive of Tesla Inc. last posted on June 21, marking Thursday as the most extended silence since October 2017. Normally a serial tweeter, he hasn’t gone more than six days without tweeting since January 2018, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of tweet data.

Click the link and you'll get 500 words and a chart about Musk's Twitter habits. American journalism is on the job.

Last night, like thousands of nights before it, USC was part of the Pac-12 conference when I went to bed. This morning, I woke up, came downstairs, and immediately crashed. When I finally woke up for good this afternoon, USC was a member of the Big Ten.

wtf?

A few days ago I wrote about an AP study showing that over the past year about 1 million voters had switched their party registration to Republican compared to 600,000 who had become Democrats.

This was based on a party switching report from L2, which combined actual data from states that report it with modeling from states that don't. Today, a competing firm, Catalist, claims that L2 is wrong: using its own actual data from all states—no modeling!—party defections have been about equal.

I can't say for sure who's right, but there are about 170 million registered voters in America. The L2 study shows a net difference in defections of about 400,000, which amounts to 0.2% of all registered voters. The Catalist report, depending on how you read it, shows a net difference of 0.1% or less.

In other words, (a) the two reports aren't really all that different, and (b) the numbers are too small to be meaningful anyway—which should have been my conclusion from the start. AP's big problem wasn't so much that they used terrible data from L2, but that they drew sweeping conclusions from tiny net movements.

When the price of gasoline goes up, it's all over the news. When the price of gasoline goes down, crickets. Guess what?

Yep, the price of gasoline has gone down for the past couple of weeks. And just like that, it's suddenly out of the news.

Of course, it didn't help that the EIA website has been down. It was still down on Monday, but when I checked today EIA said they were "continuing to restore our systems." I'm still not sure just what happened to take them down for so long, but at least the price of gasoline is back.

As expected, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling today that limits the EPA's authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Needless to say, liberals were appalled:

Richard Lazarus, a Harvard environmental law professor, said in a statement that by insisting that an agency “can promulgate an important and significant climate rule only by showing ‘clear congressional authorization’ at a time when the Court knows that Congress is effectively dysfunctional, the Court threatens to upend the national government’s ability to safeguard the public health and welfare at the very moment when the United States, and all nations, are facing our greatest environmental challenge of all: climate change.”

I haven't said much about this until now because I'm conflicted about it. On the one hand, we are literally frying our planet and this is hardly the time for courts and legislatures to be playing stupid logic games about what we're "allowed" to do about it.

On the other hand, we are a nation of laws, and interpreting those laws often becomes a logic game. In this case, the primary question is the breadth of EPA's authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate new (and upgraded) power sources. Can they regulate only the power sources themselves, or can they mandate a shift in power sources (from coal to natural gas, for example). In dissent, Elena Kagan is clear:

The majority says it is simply “not plausible” that Congress enabled EPA to regulate power plants’ emissions through generation shifting. But that is just what Congress did when it broadly authorized EPA in Section 111 to select the “best system of emission reduction” for power plants. The “best system” full stop—no ifs, ands, or buts of any kind relevant here.

By contrast, the majority opinion says this language is a mere "gap filler" (it's contained in a definition section that precedes the statutory language) and that the Clean Air Act nowhere authorizes generation shifting. What's more, history shows that the EPA knows this perfectly well:

Prior to 2015, EPA had always set Section 111 emissions limits based on the application of measures that would reduce pollution by causing the regulated source to operate more cleanly—never by looking to a “system” that would reduce pollution simply by “shifting” polluting activity “from dirtier to cleaner sources.”

Their conclusion is that generation shifting is too big a deal to infer from throw-away language. If this is what we want to do, it needs authorization from Congress, not a federal agency feverishly parsing generic language to give itself huge, highly specific new authority.

This doesn't strike me as unreasonable, though it's obviously tricky to figure out just how broad a grant of authority Congress gave to EPA in this case. Unfortunately, the liberal position on this is done no favors by the Lazarus argument: namely that the Supreme Court knows Congress is paralyzed right now, so they have to allow EPA to step in and take action.

This is sophistry, and no court in the world would pay any attention to it. On the contrary, it would be taken for what it is: a tacit admission that EPA doesn't have the authority it wants, but we should all agree to pretend otherwise because the stakes are too high to waste time with the doofuses in Congress. Like it or not, this is never going to fly.

As many legal observers have pointed out, this case is not really about the EPA or about climate change. (In fact, the EPA plan at the core of the case has been on hold for a while as the Biden administration crafts its own plan.) It's about how much deference we should pay to federal agencies who are exercising authority delegated to them by Congress. Liberals generally want agencies to have lots of interpretive authority while conservatives want to rein it in. This case is yet another example of conservatives reining it in.

The good news here is that, by itself, this case doesn't set any big new precedent—not that I see, anyway. Like last week's decision in American Hospital Association, it merely prohibits a specific action without taking a sledgehammer to current rules about agency deference in general.

The bad news is that the Court's conservatives are obviously working themselves up to swing that sledgehammer eventually. It's still unclear just how much wreckage they plan to leave behind when they're done.