Kevin Drum

Whenever I read about hesitancy in the Black community toward the COVID-19 vaccine, it's almost universally attributed to "Tuskegee." This annoys the hell out of me, and I've been meaning to write about it for a while. Today, however, Tyler Cowen points me to a piece at KQED that's practically a mind meld of my exasperation:

“It's ‘Oh, Tuskegee, Tuskegee, Tuskegee,’ and it's mentioned every single time,” says Karen Lincoln, a professor of social work at the University of Southern California. “We make these assumptions that it's Tuskegee. We don't ask people.”

When she asks the Black seniors she works with in Los Angeles about the vaccine, Tuskegee rarely comes up. People in the community are more interested in talking about contemporary racism and barriers to health care, she says, while it seems to be mainly academics and officials who are preoccupied with the history of Tuskegee.

“It's a scapegoat,” Lincoln says. “It’s an excuse. If you continue to use it as a way of explaining why many African Americans are hesitant, it almost absolves you of having to learn more, do more, involve other people – admit that racism is actually a thing today.”

The problems with "Tuskegee, Tuskegee, Tuskegee" are (a) it's mostly wrong, and (b) it allows everyone to ignore the fact that the real problem is current racism, not a scandal that began its life nearly a century ago.

In fact, it's even worse than that. Focusing on Tuskegee allows white people to shake their heads (privately, of course) over all those Black folks who are still obsessed with this one injustice that happened a long time ago. If they won't give up on the whole Tuskegee thing, then goodness. What on earth can we do about it?

The answer, of course, is to take the current treatment of Black patients seriously—and in fairness, I think the medical community has come a long way on this over the past couple of decades. But there's still a long way to go.

By the way, the KQED piece by April Dembosky is really, really good. I don't usually learn a whole lot that I didn't already know from pieces like this, but I did this time. It's well worth your time to read the whole thing.

I dunno about this:

AOC: "There would have been a lost more resistance over other measures" had progressives known $15/hr wage would fall out

"These negotiations ... were predicated" on the $15/wage. "I think that's what really smoothed over the negotiations"

Per pool via @lindsaywise @mmcauliff pic.twitter.com/smkVXhK9i2

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) February 26, 2021

The whole issue of whether a $15 minimum wage could be included in a reconciliation bill (and thus need only 50 votes to pass) wasn't a big surprise as of yesterday. It was a live topic back in January, at the same time that the $1,400 checks and other things were being negotiated. And while Democratic leaders tried to put a brave face on it, it was surely obvious to everyone that it had no real chance of being approved by the Senate parliamentarian. The rules¹ say that to be part of a reconciliation bill, a provision needs to directly impact the budget. It can't just be "incidental"—and the minimum wage is practically the definition of something that has only an incidental effect on the budget.

This is Legislation 101. It may be Greek to your average schmoe, but to anyone in Congress it's one of the basics of the legislative process. There's no way that AOC and the rest of the progressive caucus didn't know this.²

In the end, though, this is all pointless trivia. The only thing that really matters is whether the $15 minimum wage could have gotten 50 votes in the first place. It almost certainly couldn't because there are two Democratic senators opposed to it, so it's irrelevant what the parliamentarian ruled. It failed for normal reasons of not having enough support.

¹Make no mistake: these may indeed be the rules, but the rules are ridiculous. They are designed to allow a few exceptions here and there to the filibuster, and they wouldn't exist in the first place if we could just kill the filibuster. So forget all the hot air about the "unelected bureaucrat" who killed the $15 minimum wage. She's just doing her job. The real answer here is to (a) round up the votes to eliminate the filibuster and (b) then round up the votes to raise the minimum wage.

²Alternatively, maybe they really were this oblivious to the basics of federal legislating. If so, they should be relieved to be taught a lesson at a fairly low price.

My sister has informed me in no uncertain terms that she expects cat blogging today. None of this horse nonsense like I had last Friday.

No problem! Here is Hilbert in Marian's sewing room upstairs, sitting in the chair that's supposed to be for me when I come in to visit. It's rarely available, though, since Hilbert is so taken with it. Life is hard sometimes.

The Biden administration has released an unclassified intelligence document confirming that Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. This comes as a surprise to precisely no one, but it still makes a difference that Biden has decided to make it public. The Washington Post reports that it's all part of a larger plan:

As part of his promise to “recalibrate” relations with Saudi Arabia, Biden has cited several issues, including Saudi human rights violations and political repression, the prosecution of the Saudi-led war in Yemen and the Khashoggi killing. He has already stopped the U.S. sale of offensive weapons used in the war against Yemen’s Houthi rebels and paused for review all other weapons purchases by the kingdom, the world’s largest customer for U.S. defense goods.

This is great, and I'm all for it. Nonetheless, it's hard not to be a little bit cynical about the timing:

January 6, 2021: The U.S. didn’t import any Saudi crude last week for the first time in 35 years, a reversal from just months ago when the Kingdom threatened to upend the American energy industry by unleashing a tsunami of exports into a market decimated by the pandemic.

Thanks to the fracking boom, the US is now an oil exporter, selling about 3 million barrels of crude per day onto world markets. At the same time, US oil imports from Saudi Arabia have been declining ever since 2013, finally reaching zero in the first week of January.¹ And now that we no longer need Saudi oil, we're "recalibrating" our relationship.

This is, of course, the risk Saudi Arabia has been taking for years. As long as the world needs their oil, they can get away with a lot and there's not much incentive for them to reform their brutal autocracy. Eventually, though, the oil will run out and nobody will care about them anymore unless they do something to modernize the medieval theocracy that still controls their country.

Ironically, this is reportedly MBS's goal. So far, though, the brutality of the Saudi regime has only increased, with the promises of modernization far off in the future.

¹The drop to zero is mostly symbolic, of course, and in the most recent weeks we've continued to import a small amount of Saudi oil. But our imports might as well be zero for all that they matter these days.

It's remarkable what a little stimulus can do:

Disposable income rose nearly 11% in January thanks to the coronavirus bill passed in December. If we pass an even bigger one this month, personal income should soar.

By the way, this chart also shows how stimulus checks play out over time. The first checks in April pushed income way up, followed by a steady decline as payments faded. The same thing is likely to happen with both the December and March checks (assuming the current stimulus bill passes). This means that by this summer, when vaccinations will be widespread and the economy can fully reopen, personal income will have been kept high enough to prevent any serious effects on the macro economy. Put that together with the effect of the stimulus bills on the personal saving rate . . .

. . . and there's every reason to think we'll enter autumn with everything in place to get the economy thriving once again.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 25. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

A quick reminder. You've probably been hearing a lot about whether Democrats can eliminate the filibuster. Or what can be passed via reconciliation. Or the Byrd Rule. Or whether the Senate parliamentarian's rulings can be overturned by Kamala Harris in her role as president of the Senate.

If you're interested in the details of all these things, fine. If you're not, they all boil down to the same thing: Do Democrats have 50 votes to do what they want to do? That's it. It takes 50 votes (plus Harris) to kill the filibuster. It takes 50 votes to pass even a reconciliation bill. If Harris overrules the parliamentarian on a substantive point, you're left with a bill that still needs 50 votes. And there are exactly 50 Democrats in the Senate. If they lose even a single vote they can't pass anything—and there are at least a couple of Democrats who won't vote for a bill that undermines the parliamentarian.

This means that Democrats don't have 50 votes to kill the filibuster. They also don't have 50 votes to pass a stimulus bill under reconciliation rules unless they satisfy every single member of their caucus. Every. Single. Member.

This explains everything. Forget the details. Democrats need 60 votes for most things, but even for the few exceptions they still need 50 votes and they don't always have them. End of story.

UPDATE: I originally wrote that it takes 50 votes to overrule the parliamentarian. In practice, it takes only 40 votes. The text has been corrected.

How many working mothers have dropped out of the labor force due to the challenges of watching children who are at home during the pandemic? This is not an easy question to answer, but I want to take a rough stab at it.

First off, here are the basic numbers. Between January of 2020 and January of 2021, about 5.6 million people dropped out of the labor force. Of that, however, 2.1 million are 65 or older and are retiring, not giving up on the job market. They are also irrelevant to any analysis of working parents. So that leaves us with 3.5 million working-age people who have dropped out of the labor force.

Of that, 2 million are women and 1.5 million are men. Here's how it breaks down by age:

This chart shows that women of childbearing age are dropping out at greater rates than men, while older women are dropping out at lower rates than men. The obvious interpretation is that the excess dropout rate in the 20-44 age range (i.e., the excess of women over men) is likely due to the pressures of raising kids who are suddenly at home 24/7.

That excess comes to 700,000. This is a rough estimate, but as far as I know there's no reliable survey data that directly asks women why they've dropped out of the labor force. Still, it's probably not too far off the mark, especially since the difference in dropout rate by age is so stark.

This is about 1% of all working women. You may decide for yourself if this is a lot or a little.

I'm not pretending this is the biggest deal in the world, but . . .

If you read the story, it's about what the headline leads you to expect. This stretch of road has been the scene of decades of nonstop accidents (13 in the past year alone), but pleas to do something about it have been pretty much met with "meh." However, now that someone famous has been injured there, there's a sudden outpouring of support for doing something about it:

The accident generated international headlines and has prompted officials to take a new look at how to improve safety....Sheriff Alex Villanueva says he will speak with city officials about possible solutions.

County Supervisor Janice Hahn, who represents the area, plans to request a safety review of the stretch of road where the accident occurred. “I have driven this road myself many times, and I have noticed how easy it is to pick up speed on that hill, but I did not realize how many accidents were happening there,” Hahn said in an email.

This is a minor example of something that's all too common. Why do we so often have to wait until some famous person has a problem before we can summon up the will to do something about it? Or, alternatively, until some member of Congress personally faces some kind of hardship and suddenly decides we really ought to fix it? Why not just fix our problems, big or small, regardless of who they affect?

While I was waiting to take pictures of the Pirate Tower a few weeks ago, I diddled around taking some other pictures too. In particular, while the sun was still up, I set a high shutter speed and took some pictures of the surf crashing against the rocks. My camera didn't appreciate this, but it did produce a few interesting images.