Kevin Drum

Jim Geraghty tells us what's on his mind:

How Can a Tired, Old, Overwhelmed President Respond to Terrible Inflation Numbers?

Earlier this week I wrote, “we don’t know precisely what the national inflation numbers for May will be, but we can all sense they’re not going to be good.” It turns out that May’s inflation numbers were the worst since December 1981.¹ The confident declarations that “inflation has peaked” in February and April and May now appear to be whistling past the graveyard, as inaccurate as President Biden’s confident assertion in July 2021 that inflation was temporary and transitory.

Golly. If only we a had a lively, young, brilliant president in office. Just imagine what inflation would be like!

Answer: the same as it is now. There is nothing Joe Biden or anyone else can do about short-term inflation. In the longer-term, we can get our supply chains back in order; we can work to get gasoline prices down; and the Fed can manipulate interest rates and asset purchases. This will eventually get inflation levels back to normal.

Now, if you want to blame Biden for passing a big stimulus bill that probably caused some of the inflation we're experiencing right now, fair enough. There's a good case for that. But using high inflation as an excuse to call Biden senile is beneath us all. At a minimum, Biden's mental acuity is better than Donald Trump's and better than Ronald Reagan's during his second term. What's more, y'all could have voted for Hillary in 2016 if having a sharp, non-deranged mind in the Oval Office were really so important to you. But it wasn't, was it?

¹Just for the record, this is technically true. However, inflation in May was 8.58% compared to 8.54% in March. So it's sure not a record by much.

Woke pronouns have drawn George Will's attention this week. The scandalous activity took place in Kiel, a town of 4,000 in central Wisconsin:

In April, the district lodged a complaint against three eighth-grade boys for the offense of “mispronouning,” referring to a classmate using the biologically correct pronoun “her” instead of the classmate’s preferred “them.” This, district officials — supposed educators — said, constitutes “sexual harassment,” a Title IX violation.

....Represented by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, the boys are arguing that their use of biologically correct, if politically incorrect, pronouns is speech protected by the First Amendment. The Constitution also forbids the district from compelling them to speak as district bureaucrats suddenly [] prefer.

Well, this certainly seems like a pretty trivial bit of middle-school horseplay, something that can easily be handled locally without getting a Washington Post columnist involved. Speaking of which, how did George Will even hear about this?

Last month, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a right-wing legal organization, sent a letter to the Kiel Area School District asking it to end a Title IX harassment investigation into three eighth-grade boys for repeatedly misgendering a classmate. To further its cause, WILL embarked on a national media campaign to draw attention to the 1,500-student district.

That attention — which included appearances on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, Newsmax and an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal — resulted in six bomb threats made against the district, Kiel City Hall, the Kiel Public Library, the homes of district employees, roads and utility companies in the city. The threats resulted in the district going to virtual school for the remainder of the year, the cancellation of the city’s Memorial Day parade and the postponement of the high school graduation.

It certainly looks like WILL's national media campaign was a roaring success. Bomb threats, school cancellation, Laura Ingraham—I'll bet those left-wing twits in the Kiel Area School District caved in fast enough after all that!

And they did. WILL assures us that they condemn the violent threats, and I suppose we have to believe them. Surely they meant this to be a discreet, purely legal investigation into a minor case of teenage harassment.

Of course, it's a little unclear why you'd get Newsmax and the Wall Street Journal involved in such a thing. Or Laura Ingraham, for that matter. Then again, Newsmax is run by Christopher Ruddy, who has a master's degree in public policy from the London School of Economics. Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal is widely respected for his dedication to explaining why conservatives are always right. And Ingraham is a lawyer. So perhaps WILL figured they were the perfect people to carefully and dispassionately explain the legal ins and outs of this case to their viewers. I didn't see the coverage in any of these places, but I'm sure that's what they did. Right?

Today is inflation day, and the BLS reports that the US inflation rate has basically plateaued at above 8%. March was 8.6%; April was 8.2%; and May has clocked in 8.6%.

Core CPI has actually declined for the past few months. Note that these are the standard year-over-year figures, which compare May 2022 with May 2021. However, if you want a sense of how inflation is running this month, your best bet is to extract month-over-month figures and then look at the trend. Here's an updated version of my chart from yesterday, which does exactly that:

This is CPI core inflation, not PCE core, because that's all we have available today. However, the difference between the two is small and the trendline is still down from last year.

Finally, if you want to see what's driving inflation, here it is. There are no surprises:

Energy has been skyrocketing since the beginning of 2021, while food began outpacing general inflation in early 2022. Core inflation, by contrast, has been rising too fast, but only by a moderate amount. Once again, my horseback guess for the components of inflation right now are:

• 2% from underlying inflation
• 2% from stimulus spending
• 2% from supply chain problems
• 2.5% from food and, especially, energy

I expect the middle two to wane over time, assuming that COVID-19 remains under control and delivery of goods and services gets back on track. As for the extra inflation generated by food and energy, who knows? That depends on global issues, and there's really no way to predict how those are going to unfold.

With my vacation officially over, it's time to put other things back into the daily photo rotation. This one is a picture of some guys playing a bit of beach volleyball in Laguna Beach a few weeks ago. I don't know who they were, but they were really, really good.

How polarized is America? A couple of Vanderbilt political scientists decided to find out:

According to the prevailing national narrative, American unity is at or near an all-time low....Even so, we do not have good, systematic evidence about national unity — or, more important, about how it may have changed over time....To overcome this, we sought to develop something more objective. The Vanderbilt Project on Unity and American Democracy has launched the Vanderbilt Unity Index (VUI) to estimate the state of U.S. unity.

Ah. An index. Basically they took a bunch of different metrics, normalized each one on a scale of 0-100, and then mushed them all together. Here's the result:

According the the VUI, American unity has declined from 68 to 52 since the start of the Reagan era. However, it hasn't declined in a straight line:

I have no idea whether this index is a good measure of what it claims to measure. However, a point in its favor is that it confirms a mountain of other evidence telling us that the long-term decline in America's political psyche got its first push in the Gingrich era but didn't really take off until the Fox News era.

By now, it might be too late to undo the damage Rupert Murdoch has done. I hope not.

Here's an excerpt from a Vox piece about the upcoming congressional hearings on the January 6 insurrection. It's typical of dozens of others I've read:

The committee is going to great lengths to make the primetime presentation compelling , including bringing in former ABC News president James Goldston as a consultant.

They will gather Thursday in the Cannon Caucus Room, an ornately decorated space that is rarely used for hearings. Using live witnesses as well as video, images and other documents, it will represent an opening argument by the January 6 Committee, as it shares the fruits of over 1,000 depositions and interviews it has conducted and 140,000 documents that it has gathered since it was established by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last summer.

The impact of these hearings is reduced because Democrats are all but bragging that they're basically a scripted show, not real hearings. Compare this to the current Republican campaign to shame the media for not giving more attention to the guy who approached Justice Brett Kavanaugh's house this morning and later called police to turn himself in for thinking about killing Kavanaugh. There's never even a hint of acknowledgment that Republicans are following each other's lead to put on a show. They play it straight, as if their outrage over media priorities were entirely genuine.

Democrats could really learn a lesson from this.

While we wait for new inflation numbers to be released on Friday, here's a quick look at the inflationary pressure facing the economy right now:

This is based on core PCE inflation, the Fed's preferred measure. However, instead of showing year-over-year inflation, it uses month-over-month in order to get a sense of how inflation is rising or falling at any given moment. Unfortunately, because month-over-month figures are volatile, the number for any single month is pretty meaningless. The only way to extract anything is to look at the longer term trend.

So that's what this is. Since core inflation peaked in April 2021, the trendline has gone down from about 6% to 4%. This represents, I believe, the fading away of fiscal stimulus and the recovery of supply chains, both of which should continue.

Food and energy, though, will probably remain volatile, and that's what most people care about. Unfortunately, there's nothing much the Fed or anyone else can do about that. Monetary policy mostly affects core inflation, which is already trending down, and presidential policy doesn't affect much of anything at all.

This is an allegedly famous house in the town of Vernon, but I suspect "famous" should be taken in the same sense you'd take "World Famous Burgers" at your local diner. Maybe it's locally well known, but it probably ranks about 100,000th on the global list of famous things.

Pretty, though.

Here in the western United States, everything is drying up. Just about everyone is familiar with time-lapse photographs of Lake Mead, the reservoir created by Hoover Dam, showing how its water level has been steadily falling for decades. It's down 160 feet since 2000, and if it drops another hundred feet the lake will no longer have enough water to drive the turbines that produce 4 billion kWh of clean electricity every year.

But it's not just Lake Mead that's drying up. Utah is facing big problems too:

If the Great Salt Lake, which has already shrunk by two-thirds, continues to dry up, here’s what’s in store:

The lake’s flies and brine shrimp would die off — scientists warn it could start as soon as this summer — threatening the 10 million migratory birds that stop at the lake annually to feed on the tiny creatures. Ski conditions at the resorts above Salt Lake City, a vital source of revenue, would deteriorate. The lucrative extraction of magnesium and other minerals from the lake could stop.

Most alarming, the air surrounding Salt Lake City would occasionally turn poisonous. The lake bed contains high levels of arsenic and as more of it becomes exposed, wind storms carry that arsenic into the lungs of nearby residents, who make up three-quarters of Utah’s population.

Here is what the Great Salt Lake looked like as of 16 hours ago:

Do you see that big chunk of land in the lower left that's connected to Ogden by a bridge? It's called Antelope Island. You know why? Because it used to be an honest-to-God island. Today you can just about walk to it if you wear a pair of good waders.

Why the change? Partly because of Salt Lake City's exploding population and partly because of climate change. Or, more accurately, because of our collective unwillingness to either fight climate change or even adapt to it. In a few decades, if this keeps up, Salt Lake City may become a new Dust Bowl.

While I was away, Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel posted a joke on Twitter:

This is a tasteless joke and I have no idea what prompted Dave to retweet it. A little too much to drink? A recent breakup? Beats me. I hope his editors tell him that this was inappropriate and he needs to knock it—

Wait. What's that? This retweet caused an enormous backlash among some of his fellow reporters and then went viral? And the Post then suspended Dave for a month without pay—the equivalent of a five-figure fine?

WTF? There has to be something more to this. What is it that we're all missing?