This is your periodic reminder that America's political problems are largely the fault of Fox News. The rage and fear that are the hallmarks of contemporary politics are rooted almost entirely in the rise of Fox News, which needs to be buried in the ash heap of history, where it belongs.
In the meantime, you should shun anyone who works for Fox News or appears as a guest on their shows. I don't care what they do, they are enabling an organization run by rich foreigners whose sole ambition is to wreck the United States in return for money. You should no more treat Fox employees as innocent bystanders than you would treat members of the CSA as ordinary loyal Americans. There are plenty of other jobs available that don't require you to be complicit in a predatory scheme to destroy the country.
Here it is: the third and last of my mystery wildflowers. It looks fairly ordinary, but for some reason I was never quite able to match it up with anything in my Orange County wildflower book. What does the hive mind think of this?
April 20, 2019 — Laguna Coast Wilderness Park, Orange County, California
Aaron Blake asks an obvious question today: Why are Republicans starting up yet another debt ceiling battle? Don't they know they always lose them?
The answer is equally obvious: Of course they know. But it doesn't seem to hurt them at the polls, while it does create a sense of crisis and chaos that gets in the way of Democrats getting anything done. It's a pretty understandable strategy for a minority party trying to put some sand in the gears of the opposition.
Republicans will cave in eventually, and nobody should be shocked when they do. After all, the whole thing is laughable. During past debt ceiling battles, people like me would earnestly break down the federal budget and announce that if the debt ceiling isn't raised it would require us to shut down blah blah blah lots of stuff.
This time there's no point to this exercise because our current budget deficit is so enormous. If we breached the debt ceiling and had to cut back spending to match incoming revenue, it would mean literally shutting down every single function of government, both domestic and defense, and whacking a trillion dollars or so from Medicare and Social Security. No one is going to do that.
But in the meantime it will make Democrats squirm. That's all this is about.
I call this "Moon and Mass: A Reverie on the Liminal in an Era of False Certainties." Signed prints suitable for framing are available on application to my agent.
A leading asthma patient group has issued a warning against a coronavirus treatment circulating on social media that is leading some people to post videos of themselves breathing in hydrogen peroxide through a nebulizer....“DO NOT put hydrogen peroxide into your nebulizer and breathe it in. This is dangerous!” wrote the foundation in a brief blog post.
Where does this shit come from? Seriously, who is it that makes up this random stuff? And what accounts for which weird treatments catch on and which ones don't?
I'm planning to cross Louisiana off the list later this year. Maybe I'll pop over to Mississippi while I'm there. Vermont and Alaska are both pretty, so they could be targets of photography expeditions someday.
But what about North Dakota? What excuse will I ever have for visiting Fargo?
I mentioned in an earlier post that conventional wisdom remains stuck in the belief that middle-class incomes have tanked, and this belief hasn't really changed even though it no longer fits the facts of the past few years of strong income growth.
But things are more complicated than that, and I thought you might be interested in seeing a few different ways of measuring middle incomes. None of these is "right." They're just measuring similar but different things.
First up is your basic measure of median income from the Census Bureau:
With a judicious choice of starting point, it was easy at the end of Great Recession to say that incomes had been stagnant since the '70s. However, even this chart can't avoid the fact that since 2012 the median income for prime-age workers has increased by nearly 20%. The stagnant income story, whether for Millennials or anyone else, just doesn't wash anymore.
But there are other ways to measure income. Here's one:
This is a measure of "nonsupervisory" wages, which is basically blue-collar wages. In this case, it looks like wages are stagnant or down all the way through the late '90s, but have grown nearly 30% since the year 2000. The timeframe is different, but it once again shows that the conventional wisdom of stagnant wages has passed its sell-by date.
Finally, here's a third way of measuring income:
This is an unusual measure of income. It's after-tax income adjusted for benefits from government programs. It covers the middle 60% of the population, which is basically the bottom of working class to the top of middle class. What it shows is that middle incomes have been steadily rising for the past 40 years and are now 65% higher than in 1980.
There's a flat spot from the start of the Great Recession through about 2014, but that's hardly surprising. Since then, incomes have risen 15%.
In addition, consumer debt has declined by a third over the past few years; bankruptcies are almost down to nothing; and delinquent loans have plummeted for practically every age group.
Depending on which of these income metrics you believe, the conventional wisdom of stagnant middle-class incomes has been obsolete since 2015, since 2000, or was never really true at all. But one way or another, it's obsolete now.
None of this is meant to suggest that the economy has been great for the middle class. Both the rich and the poor have done better, and over the past few decades the growth in middle-class incomes has been a weak 0.5-1.5% per year depending on which measure you use.
Still, at the very least middle incomes have grown over the past six or seven years, and it's no longer accurate to talk about stagnant wages no matter what measure you prefer. Too many people seem to have ignored this.
POSTSCRIPT: It's worth noting that this is merely raw data, as the headline says. You should use it if you care about accuracy.
However, it remains the case that income growth has been worse for the middle class than for anyone else, thanks to massive growth among the rich and big growth in government assistance among the poor. If you wonder why the middle class feels squeezed, this is part of the answer. They feel like everyone else is doing better, and they're right.
I've been derelict in covering the day-to-day news out of Washington, so let's catch up with what Democrats are up to.
First off, there's the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Thanks to help from Republicans it passed in the Senate last month with 69 votes, well over the 60 needed. It is now waiting for action in the House. Centrists love this bill.
Second, there's the $3.5 trillion omnibus spending bill, which hasn't yet passed anywhere. It's a reconciliation bill, which means it needs only 51 votes, so Democrats can pass it all by themselves. Unfortunately, two Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, aren't on board. Even more unfortunately, neither Manchin nor Sinema has made it clear just what changes they want to the bill. This is very odd, but that's where we stand.
Progressives love the $3.5 trillion bill. Centrists are not so keen on it.
But hey—at least the infrastructure bill will get passed, right? That's less clear than you'd think. Right now, Nancy Pelosi is holding it up because she wants to pass both bills as a package. She's afraid that if the infrastructure bill passes by itself, centrists will have gotten everything they want and will bail on the omnibus bill. House progressives agree, and have threatened to vote against the infrastructure bill even if Pelosi brings it up for a vote.
So that's where we are. Progressives won't vote for the infrastructure bill unless they can also vote on the omnibus bill. But Manchin and Sinema are holding up the omnibus bill and refusing to say what it would take to get their votes. It seems beyond belief that both bills might fail, but right now that's a distinct possibility.
What the hell is going on in there?
Finally, winding around all of this, is a third bill. We are once again getting close to our debt ceiling, so Democrats need to pass a bill to raise it. Republicans are just laughing at them and declaring that they'll filibuster a debt ceiling bill just to create chaos.
One solution to this is to put the debt ceiling increase into the omnibus bill and pass it solely with Democratic votes. In fact, Democrats could even vote to eliminate the debt ceiling entirely. However, the leadership of the party has refused to do this for reasons that I haven't quite sussed out. Instead, they plan to introduce a "clean" debt ceiling bill and make Republicans vote against it. I guess they're gambling that in the end Republicans will buckle when the government shuts down because we can no longer fund it all. We'll see.
Helluva mess, isn't it? This is what happens when you have a 50-50 Senate and have to satisfy every single senator.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Chinese president Xi Jinping has grown weary of capitalism and is waging a campaign to put the Chinese economy more firmly under the thumb of state control:
Xi Jinping’s campaign against private enterprise, it is increasingly clear, is far more ambitious than meets the eye....He is trying to roll back China’s decadeslong evolution toward Western-style capitalism and put the country on a different path entirely
....In Mr. Xi’s opinion, private capital now has been allowed to run amok, menacing the party’s legitimacy, officials familiar with his priorities say. The Wall Street Journal examination shows he is trying forcefully to get China back to the vision of Mao Zedong, who saw capitalism as a transitory phase on the road to socialism.
Mr. Xi isn’t planning to eradicate market forces, the Journal examination indicates. But he appears to want a state in which the party does more to steer flows of money, sets tighter parameters for entrepreneurs and investors and their ability to make profits, and exercises even more control over the economy than now.
....Industries that Mr. Xi views as being led astray by a capitalist spirit, including not only tech but also after-school tutoring, digital gaming and entertainment, are bearing the immediate brunt.
This is not a good sign for China. Free market capitalism may have its problems, but it delivers the goods when it comes to economic growth. Moving even further toward a state-directed economy is almost certain to be a self-destructive move.
It's a funny thing. Back during Cold War 1.0 I felt that right-wingers who hyped the Soviet threat were showing that they didn't have the courage of their economic convictions. The US practiced free market capitalism while the Soviets ran a heavily state-directed socialism. If you really believed in capitalism, you would also have believed that the US would inevitably crush the Soviets and eventually put them into bankruptcy if they tried to keep up (or pretended to).
This is why, aside from the nuclear threat, I was never much worried about the Soviet Union's global ambitions. I did believe in capitalism, and the Soviet Union seemed like a country that would fall further and further behind us until its influence in the world was all but gone.
Now we're stumbling into Cold War 2.0, and China is certainly a bigger economic competitor than the old Soviets ever were. Nevertheless, I still believe in capitalism. China is far behind us economically, and if they're actively backing away from free markets they're unlikely to ever make up the gap.
And that's not all. I'm no China expert, but I've long thought that China is likely to reach a point this decade where they start to have real challenges from both demographic decline and a difficult transition away from a low-wage economy. If they also choose this decade to strangle their economy their problems will only multiply.
I'm all in favor of keeping of keeping a gimlet eye on China. Our plan of engaging with them in hopes that they'd become a better actor on the world stage obviously didn't work, and over the last few years it's become increasingly obvious that they consider us their #1 adversary. That said, it would be wise on our part not to overestimate their capabilities or to panic every time they launch a new aircraft carrier. If the Journal is right about their economic direction, we will simply outgrow them, just as we outgrew the Soviet Union.
And that's not all. I'm no China expert, but I've long thought that China is likely to reach a point this decade where they start to have real challenges from both demographic decline and a difficult transition away from a low-wage economy. If they also choose this decade to strangle their economy their problems will only multiply.