I mentioned inflation in the previous post, but it’s worth pointing out something that hasn’t gotten a ton of attention: since the beginning of 2017, inflation has been dead flat:

Some of this is due to declining oil prices, but even the core indexes (which exclude food and energy) are running at an annual rate of only 0.8 percent. This is yet another sign that the economy has been so-so over the past few months. Wage growth is modest and there’s no inflationary pressure at all.

Has the economy really recovered? Wages are the big story, and Jared Bernstein has everything you ever want to know here. But in case you just want the nickel version, here it is:

Since 2014, hourly wages have gone up 1.6 percent per year for all employees and 1.5 percent per year for production and nonsupervisory employees. The Employment Cost Index, which includes benefits, has increased even less.

The real question, however, is whether we’re seeing any acceleration in wages. It sure doesn’t look like it to me. If you squint, you can see that wage growth is slightly higher since the start of 2017, but that’s entirely due to inflation slowing down to zero. Employers haven’t quite caught on to that yet, but they will.

My mother’s cat Ditto passed away a couple of weeks ago after a long illness. (Her orange cat, Tillamook, is fine.) So earlier this week she headed out to get a pair of new kittens who were being fostered by a friend. They are still kind of shy, but came out long enough yesterday for a bit of catblogging. The tabby is named Lilly, and she is very photogenic indeed. The tuxedo cat is Luna, so the whole gang is Tilly, Lilly, and Luna. Welcome them to the family!

Hmmm:

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and other Republican leaders in Congress on Friday urged President Trump not to terminate an Obama-era program that has allowed nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants to live and work in the country without fear of deportation.

Ryan said in a radio interview that it was up to Congress to determine the fate of the immigrants enrolled in Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which offers two-year work permits to those who have been in the country illegally since they were children, a group known as “dreamers.” Asked if Trump should follow through on campaign pledges to end DACA, Ryan told WCLO in his hometown of Janesville, Wis.: “I actually don’t think he should do that. I believe that this is something that Congress has to fix.”

In one sense, it’s good to hear Ryan say this. At the same time, I wonder if this is exactly the kind of statement that will provoke Trump into killing DACA because, dammit, nobody tells Donald Trump what to do.

It’s hard to know these days. There’s really no such thing as unalloyed good news anymore, is there?

From the Washington Post:

“Build that wall,” Trump said at the Aug. 22 rally in Phoenix. “Now the obstructionist Democrats would like us not to do it. But believe me, if we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall.”

But shortly after Trump made those comments, White House officials quietly notified Congress that the $1.6 billion would not need to be in a “continuing resolution” that was meant to fund government operations from October until sometime in early December, a senior GOP congressional aide said.

Loudly: BUILD THE WALL! Quietly: You can skip the wall.

Trump’s base doesn’t read the Post, so I guess this doesn’t matter. They’ll be content with pretty pictures of prototypes for a while, I suppose. Still, I wonder how long it will take until they realize how badly they’ve been conned. Breitbart cares about the wall, doesn’t it?

Gary Cohn is eager to be part of the upcoming tax cut team:

Gary Cohn gives quite a non-answer when asked if he is only staying at the White House to get tax reform done (on Fox Business): pic.twitter.com/u9HzWTtxkP

— David Wright (@DavidWright_CNN) September 1, 2017

Poor Cohn. He’s getting flak for claiming there’s been no tax cut for 31 years. What he obviously meant to say was that the last big corporate tax reform was 31 years ago, which is true. The problem is that it’s not clear that either Cohn or Congress is really working on a big corporate tax reform right now. As Cohn says, they’re working on a tax cut. The tax reform of 1986 did cut the tax rate, but it also widened the base and was basically revenue-neutral.

So how long has it been since a big corporate tax cut? Pretty much forever. There’s never been one. Various small changes over time, combined with corporations getting more efficient at tax avoidance, have reduced effective tax rates, but that’s it. So Cohn really has a chance to make history. If he oversees a big corporate tax cut that’s not revenue neutral, he’ll be the first person in history to do it. That’s surely something a man can be proud of. After all, lower corporate tax rates are a surefire way to boost economic growth. Right?

The American economy added 156,000 new jobs last month, 90,000 of which were needed to keep up with population growth. This means that net job growth clocked in at 66,000 jobs. That’s pretty anemic, but August usually tends to be sort of an anemic month for job growth. The headline unemployment rate ticked back up slightly to 4.4 percent, all of it for bad reasons: the number of employed people declined and the number of unemployed people increased. But there was good news for some: the unemployment rate for high school dropout plummeted from 6.9 percent to 6.0 percent.

Hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees went up at an annual rate of 2.3 percent. Considering that inflation has been running around 0 percent all year, that’s not too bad.

Here’s the latest news from Trumpland:

Last year, the officials said, the Obama administration spent about $100 million on educating Americans about their health insurance choices and urging them to enroll. This year, HHS will spend just $10 million. Additionally, HHS will nearly cut in half the funding for hundreds of navigator groups across the country who provide in-person assistance to people signing up for health insurance, making the grants conditional on how many people each group signed up last year.

Why? Because fuck you, that’s why. After all, having spent the entire year confusing the hell out of everyone about what’s going on, there’s really no need for any kind of advertising or outreach, is there? “People are generally aware of Obamacare and the exchanges,” said an HHS flack who obviously couldn’t care less if anyone on the planet is aware of Obamacare. “They are aware of the products out there and aware they can sign up.”

Of course, what most people are “aware” of is that the deadline for signups comes in January. It’s always been in January. But Trump has changed that to December because—well, same reason as before. And now he’s cut off the program that might warn people they’d better sign up a month earlier than they’re used to.

But maybe the Trump administration has some better use for this money lined up. Right? Oddly, HHS didn’t mention that. I’m sure it was just an oversight.

I wonder: do these guys think anyone actually believes them? Or do they just not care?

Here’s one of our local rabbits. Or is it a hare? Perhaps a white-tailed jackrabbit, which is actually a species of hare? Help me out, hive mind!

Over at Wonkblog, Heather Long writes:

Forget the soaring stock market. Here’s the real evidence the U.S. economy is getting better: Food stamp usage is down, and spending on entertainment — everything from Netflix to Disney World trips — is up. The average American household now spends more than $2,900 a year, a record high, on entertainment, according to data released Tuesday by the Labor Department. That’s a good sign the middle class is feeling better about how much money is in their piggy banks.

The chart below is sort of an accident because I initially went to the wrong place for the data, but here is spending since 1984 for “entertainment” as defined by the BLS and for the broader category of “recreation” as defined by the BEA:

Spending on recreation dropped for only two years during the Great Recession. Then it flattened, and it’s been rising steadily for five consecutive years. Spending on entertainment, however, dropped for five years, and has only been rising for the past three years. It has yet to return to its 2008 peak.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this. One thing, of course, is that if this is your metric for “real evidence” that the economy is getting better, then it’s been getting better for at least three years, and maybe for five. The other is that recreation rebounded sooner and stronger than entertainment. Why is this?

• Recreation includes recreational vehicles. I’m not sure how that’s defined, but it’s a fair guess that not every recreational vehicle is truly used for recreation all the time.
• Lots of entertainment these days is cheap (video games) or free (spending time on social media). This makes traditional entertainment like movies and concerts a tougher sell. However, it also means that this metric is not necessarily a good way to judge the economy.
• Spending on recreation has gone up 120 percent since 1984 while spending on entertainment has gone up only 36 percent. Entertainment is just a slower-growing category.

My best guess: Recreation is a better category to use, and it’s been on the rise since it bottomed out in 2011. There’s not much real news in the latest numbers.

Matt Yglesias has unkind words today for Paul Ryan’s alleged “tax return on a postcard.” As he notes, we pretty much already have this in the Form 1040EZ, which would fit on a postcard if it weren’t for added fluff like room for your name and address and spaces for you to sign at the bottom. If anything, though, I think Yglesias is too kind. Here is my annotated version of Ryan’s postcard:

In other words, cut the crap. If you have simple wage income and take the standard deduction, your taxes are already postcard simple. For anyone else, the tricky part is calculating your income based on the rules passed by Congress and enforced by the IRS. Ryan’s postcard does nothing to change that, which means that in real life your postcard will be accompanied by dozens or hundreds of pages of additional worksheets, schedules, and references.

But who cares, right? Honesty is for suckers these days.

Progress:

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved the first-ever treatment that genetically alters a patient’s own cells to fight cancer, a milestone that is expected to transform treatment in the coming years….The therapy, marketed as Kymriah and made by Novartis, was approved for children and young adults for an aggressive type of leukemia — B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia….The treatment was originally developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and licensed to Novartis. It was identified in previous reports as CAR-T cell therapy, CTL019 or tisagenlecleucel.

Hooray! Let’s do multiple myeloma next! This therapy costs half a million bucks or so, but as long as someone else is paying for it I figure I’m worth it.

Wildflower season is long over, but the miracle of photography allows us to enjoy it one more time. I wouldn’t say that the California poppy is the #1 reason to move here,¹ but a great big field of them in the spring might just change your mind. Or you could just visit during wildflower season, I suppose. Either way, it’s truly a delightful flower.

¹Other reasons include a better time zone; great weather; nobody cares what you wear to dinner; and we’re 2,500 miles away from Donald Trump.

President Trump today:

“We must, we have no choice, we must lower our taxes,” @realDonaldTrump says in Missouri

— Elizabeth Landers (@ElizLanders) August 30, 2017

Whether we “must” lower our taxes is a matter of opinion, I suppose. However, the question of how high our taxes are is a matter of fact. So here you go:

Gee, I wonder which taxes Trump thinks “must” be lowered?

Here’s a tweetstorm that demands respect:

The photo is of a sign in a window of a tax accountants: this is a shitty sign on a whole bunch of shitty levels. pic.twitter.com/ZaWcix9DXt

— Camestros Felapton (@CamestrosF) August 29, 2017

And now the storm:

• First: don’t disrespect geometry and don’t effin disrespect parallelograms – particularly IN a parallelogram…
• The SIGN is a parallelogram (rectangle) as is the WINDOW. Structurally the building is held up with triangles & parallelograms…
• The graphic software used to MAKE the sign contains maths that deals with vectors & hence PARALLELOGRAMS…
• EVERY season is PARALLELOGRAM season if you live in a built environment or use technology. I’m bloody glad I learnt about parallelograms…
• Imagine if I’d spent my time learning about taxes at school instead of parallelograms…
• 1 it would all be out of date now & 2 be about the wrong country & 3 be so vague as to be irrelevant to my current life.
• Oh & 4 be as dull as shit. Whereas geometry is truly amazing…
• …now no offence to accountants in general. I admire all maths related disciplines & accountants are unfairly maligned as dull…
• BUT don’t shit on a different field of maths for cheap laughs…
• ‘But it is just a joke’ no it is a shitty joke that perpetuates a shitty idea: that only ‘useful’ maths is worth learning.
• ‘Useful’ is a shitty standard for general education. Drama, literature, art, music we learn because they are good in themselves…
• ‘Oh but STEM is different!’ No! Name a dinosaur – go on. I bet you can name several correctly with the right technical name…
• …how come? Most people will never need to deal with actual dinosaurs. But we learn about them because they are FUN and weird & freaky…
• People who succeed in maths & related areas find pleasure in maths. ‘Useful’ has its place but it is not as powerful as pleasure.
• …and tying down a subject whose power is its abstractness with ‘useful’ means that it will always fail…
• ‘When will I use this’ I don’t know because you haven’t lived your life yet!…
• Anyway. Moral: don’t disrespect parallelograms.

Quite so. The problem with parallelograms is that they’re a con. They tell you that finding the area is simple: it’s base · height. Easy peasy!

But what’s the height? Crap. The length of the sides isn’t enough to figure that out. You need to know the angles too. And then you have to apply some trigonometry:

So there you go: the area of a parallelogram is a · b · sin α. Greek letters! Blecch. So sure, respect the parallelogram, but only because such a simple looking thing requires more math than you’d think to figure it out.

No worries, though. You’ll need it when you take physics anyway.

From the Washington Post:

President Trump on Wednesday will pressure Congress to pass a sweeping package of tax cuts by year’s end, but he is not planning to advance a specific plan….In a speech delivered to supporters in Springfield, Mo., Trump plans to make a populist argument for cutting taxes, saying it will help raise wages and boost economic growth, said senior administration officials who spoke on the condition they not be named.

One of the officials said Trump is going to try to tap into a view among many Americans that “the economy is rigged — that it only benefits a very small [number of] wealthy and well-connected few … The president is going to really hammer on that.”

And what’s the best way to unrig the economy? To reduce corporate taxes and lower top marginal rates on rich people! That should help all those struggling white working class folks who voted for Trump.

Donald Trump once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters would still love him. It looks like he’s about to put that to the test. If he can convince working-class voters that Paul Ryan’s tax plan will help them out, it means they’ll literally believe anything.

The latest CDC numbers on the uninsured population are out. In the first quarter of 2017 the number of uninsured in the US had dropped from about 17 percent before Obamacare to 10.3 percent. That continues to be below the original CBO estimate of 11 percent for 2016 and beyond.

The uninsured rate has been hovering at about 10 percent for the past two years, and this is most likely where it will stay given the constraints and subsidy rates of the current program. Despite the best efforts of Republicans, there’s no evidence that it’s failing or imploding or collapsing. It’s not in a death spiral and it’s not busting the budget. It’s doing fine—better and cheaper than expected, in fact—and our job now should be to improve it, not to deliberately sabotage it.

NOTE: As always, I’m using the CDC’s figures for the nonelderly population. That’s because (a) this is what CBO used for its estimates, so I need to use comparable numbers, and (b) it’s the number we actually care about. The overall figure for all ages is currently 8.8 percent.

Bob Somerby has been griping for a few days about a recent New York Times piece claiming that “Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges Than 35 Years Ago.” Is this really true? I’d say Somerby is right to be skeptical. Let’s illustrate the problem with the Times chart for UC schools:

Oddly, the data editors who created this chart included numerical percentages on the right, but not on the left. This is a very peculiar decision unless you’re trying to mislead people. So let’s take another look at this.

When you have two trends that are increasing, you can’t look at the absolute differences over time. For example, suppose I have $1 and you have $2, and we both put our money in the bank. Over a decade, inflation doubles and so does our money. Now I have $2 and you have $4. The absolute difference has gone from $1 to $2, but the growth rate is equal and our relative purchasing power is exactly the same as before. It would be misleading to suggest that anything has changed.

In the case of college enrollments, looking at absolute differences is even more wrongheaded since the top and bottom lines in the Times chart measure completely different things. So what should we look at? The answer is relative growth trends, but unfortunately the data in the Times charts is all but useless for this. The top line is percent of the college-age population while the bottom line is percent of UC enrollments. I’ve calibrated the left axis, and the growth rates look like this for Hispanics:

• College age Hispanics as percent of all college-age: 18 percent to 49 percent, growth = 2.7x.
• UC freshman enrollment as percent of all UC freshman enrollment: 6 percent to 33 percent, growth = 5.5x.

This is suggestive of relative growth rates, but without more details about the UC system and California demographics it doesn’t provide anything more than that. So I dug into it. This turned out to be spectacularly difficult, so much so that I began to wonder if I was missing something obvious. I’ll spare you the details, but in the end, my rough estimate is that in 1980 about 2 percent of college-age Hispanics went to UC schools. Today, 5 percent do. That’s very significant progress. Hispanics may or may not be “underrepresented,” depending on how you measure it, but they very clearly aren’t more underrepresented than they used to be.

I don’t feel like going through this exercise for all of the other charts. There are probably some cases where minority students really have fallen behind, though I suspect not many. And it’s certainly arguable that we should have made more progress than we have. That said, it’s just wrong to say that college-age minorities have it worse than they did in 1980. The Times should be more careful in how they present data like this.

I have a love-hate relationship with black-and-white photography. I want to note up front that I’m not talking about people who enjoy darkroom work as a hobby and therefore shoot black-and white. I’ve done plenty of that in my life, and it’s a lot of fun.

I’m talking about everyone else. Virtually all photographers shoot digital these days, which means they shoot in color. If you see a black-and-white image, it’s almost always a color image that’s been converted. This bugs me for a few reasons. First, shooting black-and-white is different. It’s not just color but without the color. Second, there’s often a bit of pretentiousness to it. Shooting black-and-white because that’s what’s available is one thing, but doing it even though you have an original color image is sort of annoying. Third, most photographers don’t really know how to shoot black-and-white these days. (I emphatically include myself in that.) Fourth, shooting in black-and-white seems to encourage a fascination with abstract shapes and shadows. This is occasionally interesting when done by someone really talented, but hardly ever when the rest of us do it.

On the other hand, nothing beats black-and-white for that gritty urban look. If that’s what you’re after, I’m all for it. It’s also magnificent in the hands of someone truly talented—both artistically and technically. I do still sometimes see some really good black-and-white photography, and it’s hard to beat.

But judge for yourself. Here’s a picture of a deserted country road at night. Below it is the same picture converted to black-and-white. I deliberately did nothing to try to enhance it. I just did the best I could to match the tone and levels of the original. Everyone has their own taste in these things, but I’ll take the color version.

Over at Vox today, Matt Yglesias writes about single-payer health care. This is because there’s sort of a fascinating backstage conversation playing out among progressive activists these days. In a nutshell, the question is how enthusiastic liberals ought to be about single-payer. There are several threads to this conversation:

• Are we at the point where single-payer ought to be a litmus test for any committed progressive? A few years ago this was a point of contention, but it doesn’t seem to be anymore. Whether it’s because of Bernie Sanders, or the failed Trump plan, or just a steady move to the left among liberals, true single-payer now seems to be back on the liberal agenda. Thus we’ve come full circle. Harry Truman supported single-payer; LBJ implemented it for the old and the poor; and Nixon almost agreed to it in the early 70s. Then liberals gave up on it as a bridge too far, and we got Clintoncare and the Obamacare. But now it’s back.
• Is it really single-payer we care about, or universal health care any way we can get it? This is an odd part of the conversation. Everyone agrees we want universal coverage, and in practice the only options open to us are single-payer and multi-payer. (See here for an explainer.) There’s virtually no real difference between the two, and I’ve always assumed that lefties have adopted the single-payer mantra mostly out of convenience. But maybe not. Multi-payer usually refers to the government plus some assortment of sickness funds, employers, and private insurance plans that are so heavily regulated they’re almost like utilities. Perhaps there’s really a difference between those of us who don’t care much about the plumbing and those of us who hate private coverage so much that only pure single-payer will do. I’m not sure.
• Should health care wonks get into the action by creating genuinely workable plans for transitioning to single-payer? This is what Yglesias talks about today. In a way, it’s almost a caricature of liberalism, insisting on full-blown white papers for lefty plans while our current conservative president basically won office by promising better, cheaper, more comprehensive health care that will cost the taxpayers nothing. “It’ll be so easy,” he assured us over and over. Why aren’t liberals allowed to do that?

Speaking for myself—and who else would I be speaking for?—I’d say the answers to these three questions are yes, universal, and yes. With Obamacare in place, single-payer really ought to be something that liberals coalesce around. However, I don’t happen to hate private options so much that I’d dismiss them out of hand. A good multi-payer plan is fine with me.

And yes, this probably is a good time for wonks to start putting some meat on the single-payer bones. It’s worth hashing out some of the problems now while nobody is paying much attention. That doesn’t mean our next presidential candidate has to run on a thousand-page plan, only that our next candidate should have a good idea of which obvious pitfalls to avoid. If Republicans had been serious about this over the past seven years, they might have succeeded in repealing Obamacare. They failed largely because they settled for crowd-pleasing slogans and were blindsided when it turned out that simple-minded legislation wasn’t as popular as simple-minded red meat for the base. Liberals would be wise to avoid the same mistake.