Kevin Drum

I was busy driving from the Louisiana swamps to the Houston airport on Friday, which means I missed providing you with my keen insights on the latest jobs numbers. Can't have that! Here they are:¹

It turns out there really are a couple of interesting things to say this month. First, we added 531,000 jobs in October and revised upward the estimates for August and September by 235,000, for a total of 766,000 more jobs than we thought we had a month ago. The headline unemployment rate dropped to 4.6%. That's really good.

In fact, given my belief that we're really only about a million jobs short of where we ought to be, this represents a huge chunk of the "worker shortage" we hear so much about. And it's still a huge chunk even if I'm off by a factor of two or so.

The other interesting thing is wages. For some reason there's been an awful lot of chatter lately about strong wage growth over the past year, but I'm not sure where it comes from. Here is overall wage growth:

It's true that we had strong earnings growth for several years before the pandemic. It's also true that there was a surge in wages right at the start of pandemic, which put us at a permanently higher level.

However, since the middle of 2020 there's been essentially no wage growth after you account for inflation. Keep this very firmly in mind whenever you hear that companies can't attract as many workers as they need. The truth is that they really aren't trying very hard.

¹Note that I've changed the layout of the chart I use by eliminating the months with gigantic ups and down during the pandemic. Those huge swings are old news, and they make it hard to see what's going on in more normal months. With a y-axis range of -400,000 to +800,000, it's much easier to see the changes over the past year or so.

POSTSCRIPT: And since we all love anecdotes, I've got one for you. We've all seen the signs offering jobs at McDonald's for $18 per hour. Wow! But those are mostly in big urban areas where the media hangs out, like New York and Los Angeles. But I just got back from Louisiana, and I saw plenty of help wanted signs there too. They were offering jobs at McDonalds for $10 per hour. Suddenly those $18 jobs sound more like regional outliers than trends for the whole country.

Hoo boy, conservatives are pissed this morning. Not at liberals, for once, but at the 13 traitors in the Republican Party who voted to pass the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Philip Klein is typical:

Disgraceful House Republicans Rescue Biden’s Flailing Agenda

Just before midnight on Friday, we witnessed an utterly disgraceful act by a group of 13 House Republicans....On Friday night, after months of back and forth, it looked like Biden’s agenda could suffer another setback, as not all progressives were sold on the idea of agreeing to pass the infrastructure bill...With only three “no” votes to spare within her own caucus, Pelosi lost six Democrats — enough to sink the bill. Yet 13 Republicans swooped in to rescue Pelosi, provide Biden with the biggest victory of his presidency, and put the rest of his reckless agenda on a glide path to passage in the House.

This is a substantively bad decision that is political malpractice. It represents a betrayal.

....Every Republican who voted for this monstrosity who is not already retiring should be primaried and defeated by candidates who will actually resist the Left-wing agenda. Those who are retiring should be shamed for the rest of their lives. It also is not too soon to be asking whether Representative Kevin McCarthy should be ousted from leadership for his inability to keep his caucus together on such a crucial vote.

It is sort of interesting that 13 Republicans broke ranks on this bill. They usually show more discipline than that. But it's more interesting to parse the reaction from the right. Klein and other critics of the bill generally think we already spend enough on infrastructure—which I think is a defensible position—but their biggest complaint by far isn't substantive at all. They just hate hate hate the idea of giving Joe Biden a win—any win.

Needless to say, this is at the heart of political dysfunction in this country. It's one thing to oppose things that Democrats and Republicans have always fought over, but it's quite another thing to fight against everything across the board that comes from the opposition party. There's just too much stuff that's both necessary and relatively uncontroversial, but might also be considered a win for the bad guys. If you maintain a knee-jerk opposition to all of this, the country can barely survive.

This cat is the mascot of Cajun Encounters. I met her after taking one of their swamp tours.

She was willing to let me scratch her head, but then got a little discommoded by the crowd and wandered off to her hidey hole. Judging by the condition of her left ear, there must have been at least one dark night when she didn't get to her hidey hole quite quickly enough.

For what it's worth, I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about CRT and the "public school" problem that presumably led to Democratic election losses on Tuesday. It's not that this is a trivial issue or anything like that. On the contrary, it's been around in one form or another for decades and it's always been a reliable source of conservative fury whenever it resurfaces.

But it only resurfaced now because Fox News decided it should. They've spent months hammering on it, which successfully moved the needle a few percentage points in Virginia, but there's no guarantee that they'll keep that up for the next year. In fact, it's unlikely. There will be something new by then.

The only thing that's (almost) guaranteed is that next year's outrage will, subtly or otherwise, push racial hot buttons in Fox's audience. That's something that liberals need to figure out how to fight more effectively.

This tweet is making the rounds today:

"A gallon of milk was $1.99. Now it's $2.79. When you buy 12 gallons a week times four weeks, that's a lot of money."@EvanMcS goes grocery shopping with the Stotlers and shows us how badly inflation is hitting the middle class. pic.twitter.com/39hPPRHLja

— Brianna Keilar (@brikeilarcnn) November 4, 2021

Most of the tweets are from people wondering who buys 12 gallons of milk per week, but that's hardly interesting. The answer is that the Stotlers have adopted a bunch of kids and now have nine children living under their roof.

What's more interesting about this news segment is what it tells us about people's perceptions of inflation. Let's review. At one point, Mrs. Stotler says, "I think probably in June it was about a dollar was worth a dollar, so now that dollar is worth about 70 cents."

A little later, she gets specific: milk has gone up from $1.99 to $2.79.

Their total shopping bill for the week comes to $310. A few months ago, "we would have spent probably 150, 200 dollars, something like that."

We also have USDA figures for the price of milk. In Dallas, it's gone up from $2.99 to $3.29 since last June. (That's an average. It might be cheaper at certain stores.)

As it happens, the price of milk bounces quite a bit around depending on the mood of the cows and the whims of the bureaucrats. In the past year, a gallon of milk in Dallas has gone up from $3.03 to $3.29.

Here's how this nets out:

• First Stotler guess: Inflation is running at about a 100% annual rate.
• Second Stotler guess: inflation is running at about a 90% annual rate.
• Third Stotler guess for all groceries: inflation is running at a 70-140% annual rate.
• USDA figures: Extrapolating from the June price, the cost of milk is going up at about a 25% annual rate.
• Also USDA figures: Milk has actually gone up 8% in the past year.
• BLS: The inflation rate for groceries in general is currently 4.4%

Altogether, as we move from personal feelings to actual numbers, our estimate of inflation in the grocery store declines from about 100% to about 4%.

There are some cognitive biases at play here. Obviously one of them is that most of us are bad at mental math and draw wildly incorrect conclusions about relative prices.

But the cognitive bias most at work here is that when we think of prices, our brains go back to eras long past. It seems as if milk only cost $1.99 a few months or a year ago, but it didn't (unless it was on sale or something). It's been years since milk cost so little, but our memories are largely stuck in our early adulthood, when we first started paying attention to things like the price of milk. Mrs. Stotler, by misremembering the price of milk a year ago and then doing some bad mental math, concludes that inflation is running at an insane rate. The truth is that groceries are up 4.4% and milk is up only a little more than that.

I don't blame Mrs. Stotler for any of this. It's just a common human foible. But I do blame CNN for not spiking this story—or, at the very least, providing the full context along with the actual level of inflation in the grocery store. Instead, Evan McMorris-Santoro made every effort to imply that the Stotler's figures were an accurate and alarming reflection of the actual inflation rate today.

Why? Why do television correspondents keep doing this? It's very little short of a bald-faced lie.

We interrupt our ongoing saga of Louisiana's swamps and bayous to bring you some breaking news. On Wednesday morning, shortly after I got on Interstate 10 heading east, I ran into this:

Now that's an accident! The odd thing is that the pickup doesn't look damaged at all. So how did it end up halfway across the median divider? I suppose I'll never know.

In any case, here's what the westbound side of the highway looked like:

Traffic was completely stopped for three miles. And since the highway is passing over a swamp, there's no escape.

I ran into three huge traffic jams on Wednesday, every one of them on the opposite side of the road. It was my lucky day.

Photos of swamps and other normal things will resume next week.

I'm not really in Houston, of course. That's just where my airplane landed. After taking a few pictures of the Houston skyline I drove to my real destination: Lafayette, Louisiana, where I planned to take pictures of the swamps and bayous.

As it happens, that hasn't worked out very well yet. I spent all day Tuesday driving around bayou country and really didn't see very much swampiness at all. I think that on Wednesday I'm going to drive over to Biloxi to see what it has to offer, and then circle back to New Orleans, which I've never visited. On Thursday, after doing a bit more research, I'll tackle the swamps again.

In the meantime, here's sunrise over a small river that runs through sugar cane country, of which I saw plenty.

There's not a lot of good news for Democrats this morning. However, consider the standard reasons on offer for Dem losses in Tuesday's elections:

• Biden's "botched" withdrawal from Afghanistan.
• Endless Democratic wrangling over the social spending bill.
• Growing concerns over the economy (inflation, shortages, etc.).
• White backlash to liberal wokeness.

The good news is that Afghanistan will fade; the spending bill will pass eventually; the economy will recover; and wokeness might actually get a well-deserved reining in.

The bad news is that the party in power almost always loses midterm elections no matter what they do.

You may now decide for yourself whether to feel hopeful about 2022 vs. just slitting your wrists now so you don't have to see it.

I'm off on one of my little photography expeditions this week. Marian and the cats are holding down the fort in Irvine.

But where am I? Let's make it easy this time. . .

I am genuinely puzzled by the Texas abortion law currently in front of the Supreme Court.

Suppose it was aimed at some other constitutional right. What if California made it illegal to engage in vaccine denialism? The state has plenty of legitimate interest in this, and the spread of a deadly virus is colorably an act of violence, which brings Near v. Minnesota into play.

But instead of the state enforcing the ban, citizens were allowed to sue deniers for $10,000 in statutory damages.

Would anyone give this the time of day? Or would it be instantly laughed out of court?

What am I missing? Why is this whole thing being taken seriously?