Kevin Drum

Good news! The Senate has voted 68-32 to pass a $250 billion welfare bill. How did this bipartisan miracle happen?

• It's a corporate welfare bill, not a bill to benefit regular people.
• It's an immense hodgepodge of pet anti-China proposals that have been buzzing around Congress for years. Finally the timing was right to bundle them all together into an immense anti-China act.
• It's mostly not funded. That's left up to future Congresses.

This just goes to show that Congress can get things done. The lesson for President Biden's infrastructure bill is:

• Sell it as a bill to benefit corporations, which it is, actually.
• Make sure there's a ton of pet programs in it, something for everyone. I imagine this is already taken care of.
• Fund about 10% of it and leave the rest for future Congresses.
• AND MOST IMPORTANT, make sure to invent an "infrastructure war" with China in which we are getting our capitalist butts kicked.

See how easy it is when you just apply the right marketing? I don't understand why so many presidents have such a hard time with politics.

ProPublica reports today that someone at the IRS has leaked a "vast trove" of private data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people. This is disturbing, but what's done is done. ProPublica acknowledges that publishing this information is a violation of privacy but says they eventually concluded that "the public interest in knowing this information at this pivotal moment outweighs that legitimate concern."

It must be a bombshell, then. Let's take a look:

To capture the financial reality of the richest Americans, ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before. We compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period. We’re going to call this their true tax rate.

....In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes....His tax avoidance is even more striking if you examine 2006 to 2018, a period for which ProPublica has complete data. Bezos’ wealth increased by $127 billion, according to Forbes, but he reported a total of $6.5 billion in income. The $1.4 billion he paid in personal federal taxes is a massive number — yet it amounts to a 1.1% true tax rate on the rise in his fortune.

This is the gist of the entire piece. ProPublica simply asserts that taxes as a share of wealth represent the "true" tax rate even though the United States taxes income, not wealth. Bezos, for example, paid 22% of his income in federal income taxes. This is close to average for the top 1%. The same is true to varying degrees for the other billionaires ProPublica profiles. So what exactly have we learned?

• Wealth is not income.
• The US taxes income, not wealth.
• The income of the super rich varies greatly from year to year.
• The super rich make use of tax avoidance strategies unavailable to wage slave schlubs like you and me.

I don't know about you, but I already knew all this. The ProPublica piece is, essentially, not a revelation but merely a long op-ed arguing that we should tax wealth, not income. That's fine, but does it justify publishing private tax returns? I'm skeptical. If you aren't, keep in mind that using the IRS for political purposes has an ugly history that in no way always benefits progressives. It's not something we should take lightly.

I've been on a spurt of backyard photography, so I have a whole bunch of pictures of birds, bees, and butterflies in the queue right now.

I'll start with butterflies. Getting a picture of a butterfly resting on a plant is easy, so I've instead been trying to get them in flight, which is very, very hard. I finally decided—and this is not a joke—that my best bet was to literally wave the camera in the general direction of a butterfly in flight and rip off a few dozen shots in burst mode. This technique finally yielded one good picture, which is one more than I ever got by trying to track butterflies in the viewfinder.

On another occasion I got a picture of our pair of butterflies, who have produced a cocoon that will produce a baby butterfly someday, maybe. According to the Guardian, there are only 2,000 western monarch butterflies left in the world, which means the picture on the bottom shows 0.1% of all the monarchs in existence.

Here's a typical tweet about the job market:

BOOM.

Hotel And Restaurant Workers Are Quitting Their Jobs At The Fastest Pace On Record https://t.co/MsX2PVUV1M

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) June 8, 2021

The barely concealed point here is that workers are being treated like shit by hotel and restaurant owners who are too hidebound to change their ways, so they're quitting in record numbers now that other jobs are available. There's obviously something to this, given that job openings are up 30% since the beginning of the year. If something better is out there, why not take it?

But take a look at this:

In the most recent month, the number of people quitting their jobs was only 43% of the number of job openings. That's a record low aside from a single month at the height of the pandemic last year. What this suggests is that workers are actually being more cautious than usual about quitting their jobs. Given the huge number of job openings, the normal response in April would have been something like 4.6 million quits instead of the 3.9 million it actually saw.

In other words, take the "everyone is quitting lousy jobs" narrative with a grain of salt. It's not necessarily wrong, but I'm not sure it's necessarily right either. My bet is that when everything shakes out later in the year, we'll end up with roughly the same set of workers, the same set of jobs, and a little bit higher pay compared to pre-pandemic days. And low-income workers, unfortunately, will be treated about the same as they've always been.

We have quite the little war going on in Florida right now. Gov. Ron DeSantis, in some kind of deranged bid to be the Trumpiest pandemic guy around, has forbidden cruise lines from insisting that all passengers must be vaccinated. What an idiot! If there's anyplace on the planet that should insist on vaccinations, it's cruise ships. But to DeSantis, this is a mite too close to a "vaccine passport," which he's loudly opposed to.

But the CDC says cruise lines should require vaccinations, which is surely the sensible position. So what's going to happen?

So far, Royal Caribbean has opted to cave in to DeSantis and allow anyone onto their ships. Norwegian and Carnival are going ahead with vaccinated cruises and basically daring DeSantis to do something about it.

So what will happen? Will DeSantis try to levy huge fines on Norwegian and Carnival? Is Royal Caribbean opting for some kind of trickery, where they'll only ask about vaccination after you've boarded and you're in "international waters"? Will someone, for God's sake, talk some sense into DeSantis? There must be someone in Florida who has his ear and hasn't lost his mind.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through June 7. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

The SNAP program, formerly known as food stamps, has been in operation for over 50 years. Within ten years of its start, SNAP benefits were reaching 20 million people, representing about 10% of the population of the US:

Benefits during the early years of the program hovered around $100 per month. That went up at the start of the 1990 recession, again in 2008, and yet again in 2020. Benefits today are about $150 per month:

Despite persistent Republican efforts to cut back on SNAP benefits, it has remained a popular program, generally serving more people during recessions and then declining as the economy recovers.

However, there has also been a long-term upward trend in SNAP benefits. The number of recipients has grown from around 8% of the population in its first couple of decades to 13% or so over the past decade. Likewise, monthly benefits have gone up from around $100 to an average of $140 over the past decade.

All data comes from the USDA Food and Nutrition Program.

Dex day was on Saturday this week in order to keep me awake during my trip to Sheephole, which means that Monday became crash day. But I'm finally awake! Here are a few miscellaneous thoughts while I continue to brush the cobwebs out of my brain:

• Whatever else you can say about Joe Manchin, he's sincere in his beliefs. If he weren't, he'd be happy to bargain over his opposition to ending the filibuster. Right? But as far as I know he hasn't done this. There have been no backroom offers of ending his opposition if, say, West Virginia gets a new federal highway or something. His views may be odd and contradictory, but they're real.
• The press keeps reporting that progress is being made in the negotiations over an infrastructure bill, but that's not true. The real sticking point has never been the details of what's in the bill, but the question of how it's going to be paid for. On that score, Republicans haven't moved an inch.
• Can everyone please slow down a bit with their hot takes on the economy? The pandemic recession was a weird recession, which means that recovery is likely to be a little weird too. And in any case, even if recovery is lightning fast by historical standards, that still means it will take at least several months to unfold. I realize that a lot of the yelping about inflation and deficits is just partisan hoohah, which I hardly expect to go away, but even the fairminded among us need to understand that monthly data dumps don't tell us much. Just take it easy for now. We won't know until fall how things are really going.
• We still need a virologist to comment on the great "double CGG" proof that the CoV-2 virus was created in a lab. Come on, folks! It's not like you have anything else going on right now.

On Saturday night I trekked out to the Sheephole Wilderness Area, allegedly the darkest spot in Southern California. It was dark, but I'm not sure it was really any darker than other areas that I've been to around here.

This was, naturally, a mission to take pictures of the Milky Way. The biggest problem I have with my little camera is sensor noise, which can be improved by a process called stacking. Basically, you take a dozen identical pictures and then let Photoshop put them all together. Since noise is random, Photoshop aligns the photos and then looks for areas that differ, figuring that these areas represent noise. Everything left over is part of the genuine image, and is (more or less) left alone.

Anyway, this is what I did. I tried taking photos in RAW mode, JPG mode, and JPG mode without using the camera's built-in noise processing. RAW mode is supposed to be the best, but mine turned out terribly. I don't know why. The best results used the camera's noise processing plus stacking plus a noise reducing algorithm from a piece of third-party software I own.

Even at that they still weren't all that great. The top photo was shot with a cell tower in the foreground just so I could have something there. Unlike, say, Death Valley, which has lots of cool stone formations, Sheephole has nothing but scrub. The bottom photo was shot in front of that scrub.

All six of the final photos sported a different color palette, in some cases wildly different. In these two, the top one has the colors that I've come to think of as normal, while the bottom one is blue heavy. Others were washed out with red or green or something else entirely. Very strange. All of them were underexposed, and the next time I do this I'm just going to crank my ISO all the way to its max and accept the noise that comes with it. Then we'll really see how good all this anti-noise technology is.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through June 6. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.