Kevin Drum

The senior senator from Hawaii thinks it's past time to panic:

I swear there’s a whole cottage industry around telling people to not freak out even after a @&# insurrection and the number 3 R is getting ousted this week and there are voter suppression laws passing across America. It is time to be alarmed. It is not always savvy to be chill.

— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) May 10, 2021

Fair enough. But without aiming my response at Schatz in particular (it's a very broad response, as you'll see), what are you willing to do about it?

As near as I can tell, progressives are willing to support any idea that's completely hopeless. DC will not become a state. Neither will Puerto Rico. The electoral college will not change. The Senate will not be abolished. The filibuster will not be eliminated. Gerrymandering will not go away. Rupert Murdoch will not have his assets stripped and be hauled off to the dock in the Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity.

I have said this before, perhaps enough times to be tiresome, but the basic political lay of the land hasn't changed in a century. Every state, including the small ones, gets two senators. There are 435 congressional districts, many of them in rural areas. Only 25% of Americans self-identify as liberal. The rest of them hear Larry Kudlow say stuff like this and they nod along:

Those folks on the far-left who insist that America is a bad place are trying to tear down our system. That’s why they talk about systemic racism.

And they’ll do anything. Like packing the Supreme Court, intimidating juries, ending the filibuster, defunding the police, etc. etc. Because what they really want to do is transform this country from the greatest and most prosperous democracy in the history of history into some kind of socialist command and control autocratic country that would presumably support their left-wind ideological whims.

I don't care what you think about this. It remains a fact that there are indeed some on the left who support all these things and more, and that scares the hell out of a lot of people. It makes men afraid of making one wrong move and losing their job to a charge of harassment. It makes white people afraid of accidentally offending anyone with dark skin. It makes gun owners afraid that we'll take their guns away. It makes middle-class suburbanites afraid that we really will defund the police. It makes rural communities afraid they'll be subject to a tidal wave of illegal immigrants.

But wait. This is all ridiculous, isn't it? There are extremists on the right too, and they're a lot scarier than extremists on the left. Sorry, but no they aren't. Not to most people. That may be wildly unfair, but it's the way things are.

Like it or not, there's a reason that 75% of Americans don't identify as liberal. It's because they're scared of what we liberals have on offer. And that in turn means that if we want to win, we have to do the one thing so radical, so extreme, so completely outlandish, that even the specter of Donald Trump isn't enough to get us to do it: adopt more centrist policies.

This is Politics 101, and it explains why Joe Biden is president, not Bernie Sanders. For some reason, though, an awful lot of people have forgotten it. At the very moment when liberals should be on the verge of taking on an imploding conservative movement and smashing it to bits, we've instead chosen to move leftward—usually in the clumsiest possible way—and turn every election into a nailbiter. And then we wonder why we lose elections in North Carolina and Florida and Iowa.

I can't begin to tell you how depressing this is. I sure wish I were wrong. But a century of the most basic political science says I'm not.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 10. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

This cracks me up. Facebook is testing a new feature that will warn you if you're about to share a post without bothering to read it:

Facebook is meddling with the primal forces of nature! The very existence of the modern internet is based on people sharing things at a rate that precludes knowing anything about them. This hypersonic rate of sharing is the only thing that allows memes to go viral and thus is fundamental to Facebook's continuing survival.

Surely Mark Zuckerberg knows this? So what's the ulterior motive for doing this? To get people mad enough to demand that the warning be removed? To form the basis for some kind of research paper demonstrating that it doesn't make a difference? Or what? The idea that they are genuinely trying to slow the sharing of Facebook content doesn't bear even a moment's scrutiny.

Why has the Republican Party's leadership caved in to Donald Trump and his insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him? Is it because they're afraid of Trump's base? Because they've gone stone cold nuts? Or what?

It turns out, apparently, that the answer is none of the above. If the latest scuttlebutt and blind quotes are to be believed, they've caved in to Trump thanks to ordinary old-school extortion. In particular, they believe that if they oppose Trump he will destroy the Republican Party in a spasm of sheer bloody-minded vengeance.

Has Trump actually told them this? Or have they simply accepted over time that this is the lay of the land? There's no telling, but it makes sense in any case. Trump, after all, plainly has no special loyalty to the Republican Party. And retribution against his enemies is his single strongest drive in life. If the GOP rejected him, he would reject them in return ten times over, probably by forming his own political party and taking with him half of all Republicans in existence.

Does knowing this make any difference? I'm not quite sure. But . . . maybe? I need to cogitate on this.

Inflation figures for April will be out on Wednesday and I am not looking forward to them. The headline rate will be around 3.5 - 4%, which is not really outrageous but certainly high enough to get the usual suspects yelling and screaming.

In reality, if you correct for the artificially low base year of 2020, inflation is running at around 2.5%.

Will anyone report that the official rate is temporarily bollixed and the real-world inflation rate is 2.5%? I would like to think so, but recent experience doesn't make me hopeful. But at least the 15,000 readers of this fine blog will know the truth.

WONKY APPENDIX: This might confuse some of you, but let's take a look at the various ways to estimate the annual inflation rate in April. Here is the CPI inflation index over the past few years:

Method 1 (official): Use the April 2021 figure compared to the April 2020 figure. That produces 266 / 256.192 = 1.038, or 3.8%. As you can see, it is artificially high because April 2020 was in a temporary slough.

Method 2: Use the April 2021 figure compared to the April 2019 figure, then divide in half. This produces 266 / 255.326 = 1.042 or 4.2%. Half of that is 2.1%.

Method 3: Ignore the 2020 trough and interpolate the inflation index as if it had followed its usual trendline. This produces 266 / 259 = 1.027 or 2.7%.

Both method 2 and method 3 produce better real-world estimates of inflation than the official measure. Given the upward trend of the inflation index, my guess is that CPI over the past year has increased at closer to 2.7% than 2.1%, so probably around 2.5% or so.

In any case, definitely not 3.8%. That's the worst estimate of all.

This is sunset at Huntington Beach. The view is from Main Street looking northwest toward the condo complex across from 7th Street.

For several years I've had an idea that would at least partially address the homeless problem in warm-weather cities. It was simple: Find a vacant lot, pave it over, and let people pitch their tents there. Provide toilets and running water. If it were up to me, I'd provide food three times a day too. Establish minimal police patrols, solely to prevent outbreaks of fighting or other violence. Otherwise, let the residents do whatever they want.

I never mentioned this for two reasons. First, I figured it probably violated a whole bunch of city codes and was therefore illegal. Second, who needs the grief from the professional homeless folks who will inundate me with tweets and emails telling me that only permanent housing is a real solution?

But last week the LA Times informed me that not only is my idea not outlandish, it's actually being used up and down the Pacific coast:

Cities up and down the West Coast, including Seattle, Sacramento and San Francisco, confronted by the high cost and slow progress of building housing for homeless people, have turned to these permitted tent encampments. They offer services such as toilets, meals and help finding a permanent place to stay. These efforts, once anathema among some homeless service providers, are becoming more widely accepted as unsheltered homelessness has grown and government officials reckon with a pandemic that has made placing people in large shelters dangerous.

The Times spoke with more than two dozen people who either have stayed or currently stay in these sites. Many wished for a room in a hotel or an apartment to call their own. Still, a majority said that they appreciate these lots, some of which will eventually have supportive housing built on them.

Johnson was one. He’s been trying to overcome an addiction to methamphetamine and wants to find a permanent place to live — something he hasn’t had since he broke up with his girlfriend two years ago. A hotel room would be a start, but he won’t go to one of the city’s large shelters, which have been the site of large outbreaks of COVID-19 and have strict rules and curfews.

“You can come and go as you please,” he said of the sanctioned tent encampments, which are called “safe sleep sites” by the city. “There are not as many rules.”

Like it or not, many people on the street actively avoid permanent housing because they don't want to put up with all the rules that come with it. Go ahead and ask anyone who's dealt with the homeless. They'll confirm that there's a percentage of the homeless who will flatly refuse if you offer them some kind of permanent shelter.

The LA Times story went up three days ago, and already there's the usual pushback from the professional homeless crowd. But I'm willing to bet that a big push to build tent encampments in Los Angeles would do more for homelessness in a year than the professionals can accomplish in ten. I mean, the pros are ecstatic if they can build a 50-unit shelter at a cost of $300,000 per unit. At that rate, homelessness will be conquered by around 2080.

So why not give the tent encampments a try? They're cheap, so they won't take much money away from more conventional shelter building, which can continue at its normal snail's pace. Meanwhile, though far from perfect, I'll bet that with cooperation and a concerted effort, you could build space for upwards of 20,000 street people in a year or so using tent encampments. It might not be great, but it would make a lot of lives better than they are now.

And the public would love it. What they want is some way to get homeless people off the streets, and this would do it. It would demonstrate visible progress, and this in turn would increase support for homeless programs. Right now there's tremendous cynicism about the billions of dollars allocated to homelessness that seem to have accomplished literally nothing. Why not try to change that?

The Washington Post reports today that "Recovery’s stumbles leave Americans confronting unfamiliar inflation risk." But if you make it down to the 12th paragraph, you learn this:

To date, the increase in inflation remains modest. Comparing current prices to those one year ago also overstates what’s actually in the economy. During the pandemic’s first months, many prices — including for hotel rooms, airplane tickets and men’s suits — collapsed. So year-over-year comparisons exaggerate the degree of change. Such distortions will become less significant over the remainder of this year.

So inflation is modest, and even at that it's exaggerated, but we're going to run a story about inflation fears anyway. wtf, people?

The US recorded about 20,000 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday. That's the lowest Sunday number since the middle of last year and the trendline is heading downward. We have vaccinated about 150 million people, which is nearly 60% of the adult population.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 9. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

So . . . just a quick piece of advice to everyone writing hair-on-fire hot takes about the economy right now: The April jobs report was just for a single month. Ditto for the inflation report, the upcoming GDP report, etc. There's a massive amount of noise in these numbers right now and you really can't tell much from them.

So let everything play out for another month or two. The economy is going to open up in fits and starts and it probably won't be until July or so that we really get a grip on how things are going. In the meantime, chill. Nothing we do right now is going to affect things more than a hair anyway.