The grim body count isn’t quite over yet, but the data collected so far is stark — a 20.9 percent increase in killings nationwide, in the first nine months of the year, according to the FBI.
....Experts agree the pandemic has played a huge role in the rise in killings, but it has also probably contributed to a significant decrease in nonviolent crimes, which the FBI data shows fell by more than 8 percent in the first nine months of the year, possibly because there were fewer people on the street, fewer stores open for business and fewer crimes of opportunity available.
A huge rise in the murder rate is obviously bad news, but it's paradoxically good news too. The trendline for national crime rates never changes by more than a few percentage points a year, which means that a 20.9% increase is plainly a huge outlier. Maybe it was prompted by the George Floyd protests. Maybe it was prompted by the pandemic. But whatever it was, there's no chance that it represents a genuine change in long-term crime trends. This is confirmed by the fact that nonviolent crime was down and—if I remember this correctly—that violent crime other than murder was also down (or at most very slightly up.)
Crime rates have been unusually spiky over the past few years, and it's hard to extract much of a signal from all the noise. We need to figure out why the murder rate is up, but we should also expect that in 2021 it will probably go right back down.
In honor of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers winning the Super Bowl, here's a picture of the Pirate Tower in Laguna Beach. It's a 1-second exposure near sunset, which gives the ocean surf a misty look.
Needless to say, this is not actually a pirate tower. It's a stairway. There's a house at the top, and the eccentric dude who built it decided he wanted more than just the usual set of wooden steps when he went down to the beach. He decided on a French chateau look, and back in 1926 I guess there was no one around to tell him he couldn't do it.
One of my favorite political parables comes from the 1980 election. What happened is that Ronald Reagan loudly and persistently promised that a big supply-side tax cut would get us out of the recession and supercharge the economy. A few years later the economy recovered—as it was bound to do eventually—and Reagan was able to loudly and persistently take credit for it. The result was morning in America and a landslide victory over Walter Mondale in 1984.
The lesson here is not that tax cuts supercharged the economy. They were probably #4 or #5 on a list that includes Paul Volcker lowering interest rates; oil prices coming down; big deficit spending; and devaluation of the dollar. The lesson is to loudly claim that you're doing something to save the economy and then wait around for the economy to recover. Then you can credibly claim that it was your policies that rescued the country.
Democrats don't do this much, and it's nice to see that change this year. Joe Biden and the liberal commentariat are pretty united in their insistence that the economy is in dire shape and the Democrats' $1.9 trillion coronavirus bill will rescue us. Well, maybe it will and maybe it won't. But if the economy is doing well in 2022, Democrats are well set up to take credit for it. Ditto for 2024.
And if the economy isn't in great shape in 2022? Then it probably doesn't matter. In other words, talking up the coronavirus bill has a big upside and no downside. So talk away.
Why? Because some of the analysis is for the cumulative effects through 2031 while other parts are for the one-year effect in 2025. The best I can do is to divide the cumulative effects by ten which should roughly produce one-year estimates for 2025 that are comparable to each other. Here you go:
20+ million people will receive $51 billion in higher pay. That's about $2,000 per person.
1.4 million people will receive $17.5 billion in lower pay due to reduced employment. That's about $12,000 per person.
0.9 million people will be lifted out of poverty.
The budget deficit will grow by $5 billion.
Effects on GDP, interest rates, and the labor-capital income ratio would be tiny.
This is roughly comparable to the consensus of recent literature in the minimum wage field. Basically, a large number of people get a small increase in pay while a small number of people get a large decrease in pay. This is the basic tradeoff, and there's not a lot more that economic analysis can tell us. At this point, it's strictly a matter of values. Do you think the overall benefit is greater than the overall loss? Or not?
I was a little disappointed that CBO didn't produce a table showing these figures for various changes in the minimum wage. I know that's not their job (their job is to analyze legislation as written), but I would have been interested in their guess at the tradeoffs at different levels of the minimum wage.
I went to one of my favorite takeout places for lunch today. Normally, the drive-through line takes about 20 minutes on a Sunday afternoon, but today it was empty. I was the only person there.
From this single data point I conclude that (a) Super Bowl parties are in full swing this year, and (b) we will see a modest uptick in COVID-19 cases in a week or two.
(Why modest? Because Super Bowl parties are only a few hours long, not a whole week or even a weekend.)
It's hard to believe that I find myself rooting for Tom Brady in the Super Bowl, but there you have it. There's just something I can't resist about old folks proving they still have it.
Speaking of, Serena Williams isn't quite in her 40s yet, but she'll be looking once again for her 24th grand slam singles title starting tomorrow at the Australian Open. Hooray for us fall chickens!
How much government debt is too much? This is once again a live subject because President Biden's coronavirus bill will cost $1.9 trillion—on top of the $3.5 trillion we've already spent—and at least a few economists worry that we're adding to our debt too fast, which could bring on a bout of high inflation.
Now, even the cautious economists mostly agree that the risk of doing too little is greater than the risk of doing too much. So if we're unsure, then the full $1.9 trillion is the way to go. Progressive pundits pretty unanimously agree.
And so do I. On the other hand, I'm a little nervous about the seemingly casual attitude among some progressives about government debt. It's one thing to (maybe) overspend during an unprecedented pandemic, but it's another thing to shrug your shoulders and basically say that debt doesn't matter and we should all get over it. And if inflation heats up, hey, all we have to do is engineer a recession to show it who's boss, just like Paul Volcker did. This all seems just a little too world-weary to me.
On the third hand, there's this:
Japan has had massively higher debt than the US for the past two decades, and the price they've paid for this is . . . close to nothing. Japan, like the US, issues its own currency, which helps, and they have a culture of saving that supports their debt. The US, however, has not just its own currency, but the best, most desirable currency in the world. Also, our debt service is low; we have no trouble selling all the treasury bonds we want; and not only is inflation low, but inflationary expectations are low too. So, if anything, it seems we're even better placed than Japan to support a far higher debt load than we currently have.
Beyond this, there are lots of econometric arguments about what levels of debt are sustainable, and obviously I don't have the chops to referee this. Still, while I retain an old-school feeling that we should take the national debt seriously, there's always Japan sitting around telling me not to worry so much. We have a very long way to go before our national debt becomes a serious problem.
There are at least two or three people out there who crave a detailed explanation of every aspect of my blog design. Right? I aim to please, so here it is.
First off, longtime readers will note that the design is very old school: two-columns, with miscellaneous stuff in the right-hand column like RSS feeds, a blogroll (!), and other things. This is very deliberate. I figured that if I was circling back to my roots, I should do a full job of it.
But if I'm so old-school, why didn't I revive the Calpundit name? There were two reasons. First, even back in the day I thought it was a dumb name and was annoyed that I had foolishly chosen it before I knew what I was doing. Second, the calpundit.com URL has long since been purchased by someone else, so I couldn't register it.
The body font for blog posts is Palatino 17 pt. I have literally been using Palatino as my go-to body font since 1985, and I wanted to use something different this time around. I found several I liked, and they all had four versions: regular, italic, bold, and bold italic, each of which is necessary for decent looking bolds and italics. However, for some reason, when I actually tested them on the blog only the regular font displayed properly. I don't know why. I finally gave up trying to figure this out and went back to Palatino, which displays properly in all its versions.
The title font is Hammersmith One 28 pt. I wanted something that was basically pretty normal but with a little bit of a different and recognizable look. Hammersmith fit the bill.
The main page title and the sans serif font in the right column are Noto Sans. It's a nice font, and I just felt like using something besides the usual Helvetica.
The header images are all pictures of Orange County that I've taken over the years. They change every time you load the blog, allegedly at random—though I have some doubts about the quality of WordPress's random number generator. Soon I will have at least one picture from every city in Orange County.
The main column is a little narrower than the one I had at Mother Jones. This means that charts and pictures are a little bit smaller than they used to be.
MoJo blog on the left, new blog on the right. Both are shown in proportion.
There is no header picture for every post, as there was at MoJo. This was never something I was thrilled with, so I've gone back to my old habit of using inline pictures when I need them and leaving it at that.
There's a menu bar at the top of the blog, so I decided to make use of it. One menu contains some of my favorite photos; another contains some of my favorite magazine pieces; and the third one answers a question I get frequently: what are the data sources I use most often?
Blog posts are now timestamped as they should be, using Pacific time. Perhaps the only time I was disappointed with MoJo was when they caved in to New York elites and switched their timestamps to Eastern time.
Commenting is done via the stock WordPress comment system, with Akismet handling anti-spam duties. This finally abolishes the much-loathed Coral comment system, and we'll see how it goes. Akismet does have an algorithm that will hold comments on occasion, or block them entirely on others, but this shouldn't come into play very often.
Why didn't I follow the crowd and move to Substack instead of creating my own blog? There were two reasons. First, Substack is primarily useful because it allows writers to charge readers on a monthly basis without a lot of hassle. However, I'm now semi-retired and I don't need money from my readers. Second, I like the blog format and I don't especially like the newsletter format, where you feel obligated to come up with a specific amount of content on specific days.
What's with the jabberwocking.com URL? Well, it turns out that pretty much every URL you can think of is already taken. Eventually I decided it was best just to choose a nonsense word, but even lots of those were already taken. Finally I thought of jabberwocky, which of course was taken, and then tried out a few variations. It turned out that jabberwocking was available, so I took it. It seemed appropriate because blogs are all about jabbering, but that's all. There's nothing more to read into it.
What about bugs and requests? I don't have an IT department anymore, so I'm responsible for handling all this. Leave a comment or (better yet) send me an email if you notice something. One thing to note is that early on I browsed through the various WordPress themes available for free and chose one I liked. It turns out this theme is no longer actively managed, which means it's possible that future updates of WordPress will bollix it. I sure hope not, though, since I doubt I'd know how to fix it.
In fact, I'll note for the record that modifying things in WordPress is a huge pain in the ass. I'm not afraid to dive into code and get my hands dirty, but at the very least I need some idea of the basic structure of the code elements and the names of the variables that control things like font type, colors, footer elements, and so forth. The best advice I've found for this is "start looking through every file in the theme until you find what you want." Thanks. Anyway, I eventually cobbled together nearly everything I wanted, but anything even remotely complicated is likely to be beyond my WordPress skills. Keep that in mind.
The lesson here is not that tax cuts supercharged the economy. They were probably #4 or #5 on a list that includes Paul Volcker lowering interest rates; oil prices coming down; big deficit spending; and devaluation of the dollar. The lesson is to loudly claim that you're doing something to save the economy and then wait around for the economy to recover. Then you can credibly claim that it was your policies that rescued the country.
Japan has had massively higher debt than the US for the past two decades, and the price they've paid for this is . . . close to nothing. Japan, like the US, issues its own currency, which helps, and they have a culture of saving that supports their debt. The US, however, has not just its own currency, but the best, most desirable currency in the world. Also, our debt service is low; we have no trouble selling all the treasury bonds we want; and not only is inflation low, but inflationary expectations are low too. So, if anything, it seems we're even better placed than Japan to support a far higher debt load than we currently have.