Daily Escape – Page 46 – The Wrongologist

Why Isn’t Good Economic News Covered?

The Daily Escape:

Crater Lake, OR – winter 2020 photo by Austin James Jackson photography.

We need to talk about the economy. The underlying economic news is very good, but both the press and the Republicans say it’s bad, while Democrats say very little.

There are three things being discussed. First, inflation is terrible. This is a key Republican talking point about how Biden is failing the country. Second, jobs are going begging in what journalists have dubbed “The Great Resignation”. This is supposedly the fault of giving too much in unemployment benefits, allowing people to stay home rather than work. Third, if the economy is so great, why isn’t employment growing faster?

Starting with the last point, take a look at this graph showing jobs growth since 2008. The blue bars are when a Democrat was president, and the red bars are when a Republican was president:

That last blue bar is the strongest jobs growth in history. During 2021, the US created more than 6 million jobs, the most since records began in 1939.

That means Biden has just managed a year of stunning jobs growth, but consumers were constantly fed headlines about “disappointing” jobs reports, because the initial reports rarely align with skewed “expectations” by economists and pundits. Explaining this should be fairly easy, but the press can’t seem to get it across to the American people.

In addition, wages have been moving up across the board:

In December, average hourly earnings for Production and Non-supervisory Personnel rose $0.12 to $26.61, which is a 5.8% year over year gain. This shows that American workers are finally building some economic power. People have choices right now. After years of worker insecurity in the wake of the financial crisis followed by the pandemic, they have options. Jobs are going unfilled, while virtually no one is getting laid off.

The unemployment rate has now fallen close to a 50 year low, at a level exceeded only by one month in 2000, and during 2018-19. The economic result of this is visible on the graph above.

While employment is continuing to be strong, we’re still lagging in terms of filling job openings created by pandemic losses. America must gain an additional 3.6 million jobs in order to equal the number of employees in February 2020, just before the pandemic hit. At the current average jobs growth rate for the past 6 months, that should take about 7 more months to reach the pre-pandemic employment level.

Economists are tying themselves in knots trying to figure out why more Americans aren’t going back to work. Some of those reasons are understandable: Fears about health, caring for someone who’s sick, and lack of childcare. But there’s a big reason that isn’t talked about. Employment has declined in the last year among workers who were 55 or older at the start of the pandemic. A WaPo analysis found that over 1.5 million more people were retired in November 2021 than would have been expected based on pre-pandemic trends. That would help explain the employment story if the mainstream media would look at the big picture instead of dutifully following Right-wing propaganda.

Turning to inflation, the WaPo says:

“The US economic recovery from the Covid pandemic was the strongest of any of the big Western economies…The Biden stimulus pushed the bank accounts of even the lowest-income Americans to unexpected heights. On average, they had more than twice as much in their savings accounts as they did when the pandemic began.

The Federal Reserve…helped, too. It held rates near zero and pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy. The twin fire hoses of cash — one from Congress, one from the Fed — sent Americans’ spending roaring back.”

Bloomberg reports that manufacturing companies are saying their supply chains are performing a little better. Their message seems to be that things aren’t worsening.

While oil prices get the most attention, the ISM surveys show manufacturers say the cost of more commodities are falling. In December, there were eight commodities that were identified as falling in price. In November, it was four. In October, just one (wood).

Finally, the NY Fed is out with its 2022 inflation expectations survey. It shows that In December, US consumers expected inflation to average 6.0% over the next 12 months and 4.0% over the next three years. Those expectations were unchanged from November 2021.

It also showed that Respondents were more optimistic about their future wage and income growth, as well as their ability to hold a job or find a new one.

One big question for Republicans is what will they pivot to if inflation actually slows down?

A larger question is why the Democrats and the press can’t explain good news when it happens?

Monday Wake Up Call – January 10, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Kohler-Andrae State Park, Sheboygan, WI – January 2022 photo by Nick Schroeter Photography

Wrongo rarely delves into religion, but since Pope Francis had comments on the slowing global population growth, Wrongo has thoughts. From the Guardian:

“In a move likely to raise the hackles of millions of cats, dogs and their human cohabitees, Pope Francis has suggested that couples who prefer pets to children are selfish.”

The Pope said that owning a pet instead of having kids meant that:

“…civilization grows old without humanity because we lose the richness of fatherhood and motherhood, and it is the country that suffers”.

Ouch. As someone who has had both children and dogs, Wrongo knows that taking care of a pet is far from selfish. As Bloomberg’s Lara Williams said:

“…the Pope could do better than to rhetorically kick puppies. There are solid economic reasons for the decline of birthrates across the world, and they need addressing.”

This isn’t a new trend. Despite optimistic predictions for a post-pandemic baby boom, last year, the US recorded the lowest rate of population growth since we began gathering data. In the year from July 2020 to July 2021, only 392,665 people were added to the US population. That’s about a tenth of one percent growth. It’s also the first time since 1937 that the population grew by fewer than 1 million people.

Here’s Bloomberg’s graph of our reproductive performance:

Meanwhile, pet ownership has been increasing, especially among younger generations. The American Pet Products Association’s annual survey revealed that millennials are now the biggest cohort of American pet owners. A 2021 AlphaWise survey revealed that 65% of 18-to-34 year-old Americans plan to acquire or add another pet in the next five years, driving a predicted 14% increase in US pet ownership by 2030.

But the falling birth rate is concerning. According to the US Census Bureau the proportion of married couple households with children fell from 40% in 1970 to 20% in 2012. While seven in 10 households included a pet.

So why are people delaying having children? A Morning Consult survey revealed that, no surprise, money is the top reason for millennials being childless, followed by the other key ingredient to starting a family: a willing and appropriate partner. The poll showed that 38% of millennials say that children are too expensive, while 33% of millennials said they hadn’t found a suitable partner.

Millennials face more economic hurdles than the older generations: high levels of student debt, stratospheric real estate prices and career instability all have been exacerbated by the pandemic. The recent rise in inflation also makes the cost of living, and thus the costs of raising a child, more expensive.

Here’s the comparison of the average cost of raising a child versus owning a dog. Pets are way cheaper:

This shows that pets aren’t cheap, but they’re far less expensive than having a child. The lifetime cost of a dog is just 15.6% of the cost of a baby. Cats are cheaper, but that isn’t necessarily a reason to choose to have one in your life.

The cost differential makes it clear why millennials might not feel financially secure enough to bring a child into the world, while the financial costs of adopting a pet is much more achievable. A few things to remember:

Pope Francis took the name of the patron saint of animals
Having children is a choice, it shouldn’t be an obligation
Catholic opposition to birth control and abortion rights hasn’t led to “loving families”

The Pope shouldn’t weigh in on the intensely personal decision about whether to have a child, any more than parents, or family friends should. And the Pope shouldn’t be condemning the childless pet owners of the world as selfish when people are simply struggling to make good life choices.

He, along with politicians, should be committed to doing more to tackle the underlying reasons why the people who might want children feel that they have to delay it.

Time to wake up, Pope Francis! How many times does the Roman Catholic Church need to hear that they should stay out of people’s bedrooms?

To help him wake up, let’s all listen to Billy Bragg perform “Ten Mysterious Photos That Can’t Be Explained‘ from his 2021 album, “The Million Things That Never Happened”. In the 1980’s, Bragg was described by Rolling Stone as “a contemporary, urban British folksinger”. Still true today:

Sample Lyric:

The conspiracy acts
The cyberchondriacs
Gripped by their fevered imagination
They switched the filters off
Too much is not enough
You know that you can overdose on information

But you know that you can’t overdose on The Wrongologist!

Saturday Soother – January 8, 2022

The Daily Escape

Hopi Buttes, AZ – January 2022 photo by Jon Ray Doc

January 6 should have been a national day of mourning. The president spoke in the very place that symbolized the attempted coup, the Rotunda of the Capitol. From Biden: (parenthesis by Wrongo)

“We saw with our own eyes: rioters menaced these halls, threatening the life of the Speaker of the House, directing to hang the Vice President of the United States of America. What did we not see? We did not see a former president, (Trump) who had just rallied the mob to attack, sitting in a private dining room off the Oval Office in the White House, watching it all on television and doing nothing for hours as police were assaulted, lives at risk, the national Capitol under siege.”

You can watch his speech here.

But except for a very few, Republicans boycotted Thursday’s 1/6 events. We have to accept that means they support the insurrection and the candidate who mobilized it:

“Top Republicans were nowhere to be found at the Capitol on Thursday as President Biden and members of Congress commemorated the deadliest attack on the building in centuries, reflecting the party’s reluctance to acknowledge the Jan. 6 riot or confront its own role in stoking it.”

Trump won the argument within the Party over his efforts to nullify the election results. McConnell, McCarthy, and their allies abandoned the thought of considering impeaching Trump over January 6. That instead became a rallying cry for Democrats. When the second impeachment went forward, the Republicans closed ranks behind Trump.

Wrongo argued for the second impeachment. With hindsight, that effort has ended any bipartisan effort to get to the truth about who and what caused Jan. 6. Republicans initially supported a commission to investigate it, but soon abandoned even that.

A bit of history: When Hitler attempted his putsch in 1923, he got off with a slap on the wrist thanks to a sympathetic right-wing judge. A decade later he was chancellor. That’s a stark history lesson for AG Merrick Garland.

The attempted putschists who stormed the US Capitol on Jan. 6 are being prosecuted, but it’s the principal organizers who should now be getting the primary attention of law enforcement. Republicans are hoping that Garland will sweep the potential crimes committed by Trump and his organizers, like Bannon, Meadows, and Navarro, under the rug.

We now find ourselves in a place where whatever the Democrats say Republicans did on Jan. 6 is mirrored: Republicans are saying that it’s the Democrats who are doing those exact things. The Republican Party is trying to end anything resembling democracy in America by relying on the claim that the Democratic Party is trying to end anything resembling democracy in America.

This is the ultimate expression of the rule that every accusation made by the Republicans is in fact a confession. From the AP:

“….since that day, separate versions — one factual, one fanciful — have taken hold. The Capitol riot — the violent culmination of a bid to delegitimize the 2020 election and block its certification — has morphed into a partisan ‘Rashomon,’ the classic Japanese film about a slaying told from varying and conflicting points of view.”

Instead of receding into the past, the story of the Capitol riot is yet to be fully written. America needs the DOJ and the House Select Committee to tell the story by criminal referrals.

Leave the history of the event to historians.

We need to take at least a momentary break from thinking and talking about January 6. It’s Saturday and time for our Saturday Soother, and boy, we need one today. It snowed quite a bit in New England on Friday morning, with totals between 3” and 15” depending on location. Once again, Wrongo’s repaired snowblower served as an insurance policy against a heavy snowfall. We got a mere 5”, so Wrongo got to exercise his snow shovel instead.

We’re having a belated Christmas party today. Between Covid and suspected Covid, this is the first time that some of us can occupy the same space. So, before the family descends on the Mansion of Wrong, let’s brew up a strong cup of Conquistador coffee ($18/12 oz.) from San Francisco’s Henry’s House of Coffee.

Now grab a comfy seat by a window, look out on the winter wonderland and listen to the “To Kill A Mockingbird Suite” written by Elmer Bernstein for the 1962 movie. Bernstein was one of the most prolific composers to emerge in Hollywood in the 1950s. It’s played here by the Beethoven Academy Orchestra, in Krakow Poland, with Sara Andon on solo flute:

A Deep Dive Into the PBS/Marist Poll

The Daily Escape:

Ashuelot River, Keene NH – January 2022 photo by Betsy Zimmerli

Much has been said about the January 6 attempted coup at the US Capitol and the reaction to it by Americans. Let’s take a dive into two of the key findings in the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll survey that was published on Jan. 3, 2022. Marist surveyed 1,400 adults between December 11th and December 13th, 2021, of which 1,310 were registered voters.

When asked about whether the Select Congressional Committee’s hearings to investigate the events at the US Capitol on January 6^th is appropriate, a 62% majority of Americans believe it is. Here’s the question that was asked:

“A Select Congressional Committee is holding hearings to investigate the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. Based on what you have seen or heard, which comes closer to your view?”

Here are the results:

That 35% believe the Committee’s work is a witch hunt is consistent with most findings where Republicans are forced to choose between mutually exclusive answers, and one answer clearly doesn’t support their Party’s viewpoint. They are in the clear minority.

A second question, asking whether what happened on Jan. 6 at the Capitol was an insurrection, a protest, or an unfortunate event? The answers were all over the map. Here is the question asked in the survey:

“When it comes to the events on January 6th, when a crowd entered the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, and disrupted the election certification process, which of the following best reflects your thoughts?”

Overall, 49% of Americans called it an insurrection, while 25% believed “it was a political protest protected under the first amendment.” Another 19% said “it was an unfortunate event but it’s in the past, so no need to worry about it anymore.”

This shows how divided politically we are: 49% call it an insurrection while 44% say it wasn’t something to be concerned about.

Democrats (89%) overwhelmingly consider it to be an insurrection while a plurality of Republicans (45%) say it was a political protest. And an additional 35% of Republicans think it was unfortunate but is not something we need to worry about in the future.

Here are the percentages of those demographic groups that agreed with the idea that “It was an insurrection and a threat to democracy”:

Greater than 50%:

95% of Biden supporters

89% of Democrats

66% of college graduates

61% of people who live in the Northeast

61% of big city residents

59% of Gen Z/Millennials

56% of suburban residents

53% of women

52% of nonwhites

51% of small city residents

50% of people who live in the West

Less than 50%:

49% of whites

49% of older Americans (75-plus)

48% of Boomers

47% of people who live in the South

45% of men

44% of people who live in the Midwest

43% of small town residents

42% of Latinos

39% of those without a college degree

39% of Gen Xers

31% of rural residents

10% of Republicans

8% of Trump supporters

Wrongo finds reason to be optimistic in these results. The fact that 62% of Americans think that the work of the Select Committee is appropriate indicates that their findings will be broadly accepted by voters. Let’s hope they publish them soon.

It is also an optimistic finding that 89% of Democrats, and 43% of independents define the events of Jan. 6 as an insurrection. Suburban voters and white college educated women – two voting blocs that supported Biden are also closely aligned with Democrats on those feelings.

The poll also found that 53% of Americans still say Trump was at fault for what happened at the Capitol. This view has softened since Marist polled it on January 7, 2021, when 63% of Americans said they blamed Trump. That’s consistent with the continuing Right wing narrative about Jan. 6, saying that it was really just protected speech.

Overall, there are two necessary steps to securing our democracy.

First, what comes out of the investigative work by the DOJ and the House Select Committee will be accepted by the majority of Americans. That means any indictments of politicians that come from either will be broadly supported.

Second, the Congress needs to legislate to ensure that all votes are counted and that those counts are reflected fairly in the results in every state and cannot changed by partisan election officials. That is an outcome that Pelosi and Schumer must deliver in the first half of 2022.

We have to hope that both can happen before the November mid-terms.

Saving The Republic By Destroying It

The Daily Escape:

New Year’s Day, Pike National Forest, near Colorado Springs, CO – January 2022 photo by Daniel Forster

“It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.” – Tom Stoppard

Tomorrow we will observe the anniversary of the attempted coup at the US Capitol. For the most part, in response, America will do nothing. The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman wrote last month,

“Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response.”

There are tens of millions of Americans who believe that the 2020 election was magically stolen from Trump, and tens of millions who believe violence is the answer to resolving that problem. A new NPR/Ipsos poll finds that 64% of Americans believe US democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing.”

The poll found one-third of Trump voters say the attack on the Capitol was actually carried out by opponents of Donald Trump, including Antifa and government agents, a baseless conspiracy theory that has been promoted by conservative media ever since the attack, even though it has been debunked.

Is the US careening toward a second civil war? Republicans seem to be willing to destroy the Republic to save it.

Stephen Marche published an excerpt from his new book in the Guardian. He points out that the Right has recognized that the American political system is in collapse, and it has a plan: violence and solidarity with far-right factions that want to subvert the vote-counting process.

Marche says that two things are happening at the same time. The American Right has abandoned its faith in government. The American Left has been slower on the uptake, but they are starting to figure out that the American political system which we call a democracy is less deserving of the name as each year passes.

So, the Right is already preparing for a breakdown of law and order. They’re preparing because they’re the ones fomenting the breakdown.

A University of Virginia analysis of census projections shows that by 2040, 30% of the population will control 68% of the Senate, and eight states will contain half of the US population.

The conservative project to achieve permanent minority rule long precedes Trump’s efforts to nullify the election in 2020. It’s being further codified into law in states across the country. The Senate’s built-in malapportionment gives advantages overwhelmingly to white, non-college educated voters. The federal system as constituted no longer represents the will of the majority of the American people.

This shouldn’t surprise you, since we continually elect people uncommitted to making government work. And surprise, it doesn’t. VOX’s Zach Beauchamp observes:

“America’s dysfunction stems, in large part, from an outdated political system that creates incentives for intense partisan conflict and legislative gridlock. That system may well be near the point of collapse. Reform is certainly a possibility. But the most meaningful changes to our system have been won only after bloodshed and struggle, on the fields of Gettysburg and in the streets of Birmingham. It is possible, maybe even likely, that America will not be able to veer from its dangerous path absent more eruptions and upheavals — that things will get worse before they get better.”

Can this be avoided? Unclear. The Democrats have done an excellent job in ensuring they have little bench strength. Who do they have who is capable of succeeding Biden?

The Republicans have lobotomized their talent base. Trump created an environment where any number of lunatics can claim followers that vaguely fit under the Republican banner, while the mainstream Right fails to control either the Party or its narrative.

It’s still possible for America to implement a modern electoral system, restore the legitimacy of the courts, reform its police forces, and alter its tax code to address inequality. All of these changes are possible.

However, we can’t simply hope that everything will work out; it won’t. If democracy is to survive, the US must start over. It must rediscover its revolutionary spirit. But who’s willing to do that? We seem to feel that it’s futile to expect that we can change anything.

The upshot is that people are angry. Many are checking out, no longer caring about what happens. How will we save the American project if we aren’t willing to fight for it?

What happens if it no longer matters who is running for president next time around?

We may find out.

Covid’s Junior Year Better Not Suck as Much as Its Sophomore Year

The Daily Escape:

Mt. Baker, viewed from Bellingham, WA after 66” of new snow – December 2021 photo by Randy Small photography

Wrongo tested positive for Covid on Christmas Day, despite being vaxxed and boosted. When he asked if it was Omicron or Delta, the hospital didn’t know, saying that the test might be selected randomly for further genetic testing. That means it’s highly doubtful any facility in Connecticut can separate Delta and Omicron patients. In fact, most places wouldn’t have the resources to do that, even if they wanted to.

So, while recovering here at the Mansion of Wrong, we’ve tried to take the required precautions, including cancelling family events, informing those who we had spent time with earlier that week, and masking indoors. One family friend who was with us last week, just texted to say that his 3.5 year old grandson whom he babysat for after seeing us, just tested positive. It’s rampant.

We are entering year three of Covid, and the pandemic isn’t over, even though most of us believed it would be over by now. Instead, for its junior year, Covid is looking like it may shift from a pandemic to an endemic disease, one we will have to live with, possibly forever.

We have effective vaccines, but a political effort is stoking anti-Vaxx feelings in order to keep the pandemic going. Republican leaders are opposing vaccinations, wearing masks, and social distancing (even though they know these things are very effective). And their followers are well — following, by refusing vaccinations, masks, and social distancing.

Despite Covid having a roughly 2% mortality rate, they seem to be more threatened by a vaccine that has a 0.0022% mortality rate. We can ask why GOP politicians are doing this. Most of them are vaccinated. They know that refusing these measures will make people sick and will likely kill quite a few of the unvaccinated, but they don’t seem to care.

They understand that a continuing pandemic could make Biden a one-term president. A continuing pandemic may help Republicans retake the House and Senate in 2022. Nobody likes a loser, and they think the majority of voters will blame Biden for the continuing pandemic.

The numbers are against Biden. America’s now at 821,000 dead. Unless we get very lucky, in another 100 days, we’ll be somewhere between 920,000 and 1,000,000, because since August, we have averaged more than 1,500 deaths/day. Unless the daily deaths change, we’re headed to a million dead by spring.

Republicans are going to use this fact to attack Biden, saying that he’s handled Covid worse than Trump did, because there are more deaths on his watch.

Republicans have done everything possible to prolong Covid and to slow or prevent the implementation of measures that would have lowered the death toll. It’s like an arsonist complaining about the fire department not putting out fires fast enough. The idea that Covid vaccinations should be treated as a matter of individual consumer preference is absolutely brain-dead Republican nihilism.

The NYT reports that where people are dying of Covid also has changed since vaccines became widely available: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Death rates fell in most counties across the country, and in about one in five counties, the death rate fell by more than half. But in about one in 10 counties, death rates have more than doubled.”

Now, ten percent of counties doesn’t equal ten percent of the population. Here’s the map provided by the Times:

Note the concentration in Kentucky and West Virginia. The latest data from the CDC, based on data from 25 states and cities, shows that the death rate for unvaccinated people is 14 times higher than that for vaccinated people. The article also includes a map where Covid deaths have decreased. You can view it here. In most ways, it fills in the blank areas on the map above with green cones instead of these red cones.

We’ve been at this for two long years. Now starting year three, maddeningly, the issues remain the same: The health care system is running out of resources. People can’t get tested. Some people refuse to help themselves and their neighbors. New variants can emerge in the wild faster than we can develop remedies, particularly when people won’t avail themselves of the remedies we already have.

There will be end of year reports on the good things that happened in 2021. There will be reports on both the good and bad things to come in 2022. One thing that doesn’t seem likely to be in any of those reports is a changed reaction to Covid by Americans.

Time to put 2021 in the dumpster.

Happy New Year! Thanks for riding with Wrongo for another year. Raise a glass, knowing that we will try our damnedest to make sense of it all again in 2022. Let’s close with “Auld Lang Syne” performed by The Choral Scholars of University College Dublin: (hat tip to Monty)

Christmas Day, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Great Santa Run, Las Vegas NV – December 2021 photo by Ellen Schmidt

(We will be taking the next few days off. Posting will be light and variable until the New Year)

Merry Christmas! You shouldn’t be cruising the internet today, but here you are, and Wrongo thanks you for stopping by. Many say that this is the most wonderful time of the year, but perhaps it’s better that we don’t think about what a roller coaster ride 2021 was for all of us.

Don’t you think that we need a little Christmas after the year we had? The tune “We Need a Little Christmas” is from the musical Mame, which opened on Broadway in 1966. It is sung in the scene when the stock-market crash of 1929 has just happened, and Mame’s deceased brother’s 10-year-old son has been entrusted to her care. She introduces him to her free-wheeling lifestyle, using her favorite saying: “Life is a banquet, and most poor sons-of-bitches are starving to death.”

Our economy is fine, but Mame’s saying (above) still sounds right in 2021.

With due respect to the Grateful Dead, what a long, strange trip 2021 has been. The January 6 attempted coup happened less than a year ago. Biden’s Presidency is only 11 months old. The DOJ and 1/6 Committee are working away on an unprecedented case that is way more complicated and difficult than most of us seem to comprehend. So, amid the sudden re-emergence of yet another Covid variant, in this case, Omicron, let’s take a minute to review Biden’s performance.

The Atlantic’s David Frum offers some perspective:

“Relative to its strength in Congress, the Biden administration has proved outstandingly successful. In 11 months, Biden has done more with 50 Democratic senators than Barack Obama did with 57. He signed a $1.9 trillion COVID-relief bill in March 2021….He signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill in November. He signed some 75 executive orders, many of them advancing liberal immigration goals. He’s also won confirmation for some 40 federal judges, more than any first-year president since Ronald Reagan, and twice as many as Donald Trump confirmed in his first year with a 54-vote Senate majority.”

Manchin Hates Data and Poor Kids

The Daily Escape:

Early morning, -10°F, Pagosa Springs, CO – December 2021 photo by Ben Hazlett Photography

Evan Osnos reports in the New Yorker that it was Sen. Manchin who suggested to Biden that the physical infrastructure bill and the social infrastructure bills be split from each other:

“I’m saying we can get an infrastructure deal—a traditional infrastructure deal….Then we come back on human infrastructure and look at the needs.”

Osnos goes on to say that even after the bills were split, and after months of giving ground to Manchin on the social spending particulars, Manchin never budged from an unreconstructed conservative talking point: give Americans too much help, such as extended unemployment insurance, and they will become lazy and dependent. Manchin told reporters:

“I cannot accept our economy, or basically our society, moving towards an entitlement mentality.”

Manchin’s opposition to the Build Back Better (BBB) bill has ended the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) program. According to the Treasury Department, in West Virginia, it delivered payments to 305,000 children. And statewide, 93% of children are eligible for the credit, equaling the highest rate in the country.

ABC reported that Manchin questioned whether parents would misuse CTC payments to buy drugs. In private conversations, Manchin also said he believed paid family leave would be exploited by West Virginians to go hunting during deer season. Bloomberg says he’s wrong:

Looking at the chart, people overwhelmingly have used it for food, rent, utilities and to buy clothing and education. The poorer the family, the greater chance the CTC will be spent on necessities: a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found 91% of households making less than $35,000 per year used the money to pay for food, shelter, clothing and other necessities. They also found that Black and Hispanic families were more likely to use their credits on education-related costs, such as school supplies.

An October survey by the Census Bureau found that 25% of parents with young children also use the credits to pay for child care. Manchin is worried that there will be people gaming the system, and since perfection is unattainable, we shouldn’t be giving these kids and their parents anything.

His attitude is one that many Americans agree with. They think that since they aren’t going hungry, there’s no reason for anyone else to be hungry, either. It’s a vestige of the Protestant work ethic. They think that people like CTC recipients shouldn’t get free stuff, because it is taking something from them.

It’s an ugly, selfish way of looking at life.

America has successfully stigmatized being poor. How many in the bottom quartile of income are conditioned to believe they don’t deserve help? While corporations and the top 1% always lobby for financial assistance, and welcome it when it comes.

There are persistent rumors that Manchin will switch Parties. That shouldn’t be the Democrats’ objective, but to the extent there is a purity test to be a Democrat, it probably includes helping poor children and their struggling parents.

OTOH, the Build Back Better bill isn’t fully dead, nor is the voting rights bill. There’s a whole year left of appointing and legislating before the Republicans (possibly) retake Congress. Maybe we’ll want 50 Senators until then?

Remember that the Senate confirmed President Biden’s 40th federal judicial nominee a week ago, the most judges confirmed in a president’s first year in the last 40 years.

Democrats know that few of those judges would have been confirmed without Manchin voting for cloture to end debate on their nominations. If Manchin were to change Parties and stop voting with the Democrats on procedural issues, almost none of the remaining White House appointments would be filled.

It seems clear that IF some version of BBB does pass the Senate, it won’t include all of the progressive goals. Wrongo assumes that both immigration reform and the CTC may need to be dealt with separately.

What Democrats will then need to decide is whether they’re willing to hold their noses and vote for a bill that includes $500 billion in climate change investments, plus a critical childcare provision, more for health care, and a few other goodies.

Here’s another seasonal tune, “Christmas Wrapping” by The Waitresses from 1981. This year marks 40 years since this holiday classic was released. In the song, the lead singer hints that there is a guy she met at a ski shop that she regrets not having the time to date. Later, she realizes that she must go back to the store, and meets the guy she had wanted to connect with:

Be kind, not just at Christmas, but all the time.

Biden’s Economy is Booming

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise with moon, Utah Lake, UT – December 2021 photo by Karen Lund Larsen

Bloomberg reported on Monday that the US economy is outperforming the world by the biggest margin in the 21st century. Surprisingly, they say that there’s a good reason:

“America’s economy improved more in Joe Biden’s first 12 months than any president during the past 50 years…”

They say that the objective economic data are pretty convincing about the Biden Boom of 2021, notwithstanding the contrary media narrative that seems to be driving poor public opinion. Biden is either in first place compared to recent American presidents, or at number 2 on all the big economic indicators, says Bloomberg’s Matt Winkler:

“Exceptional returns…especially the S&P 500 Index in both absolute terms and relative to its global counterparts, can be attributed to record-low debt ratios enabling companies to reap the biggest profit margins since 1950. Corporate America is booming because the Biden administration’s Covid-19 vaccination programs and $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan reduced the jobless rate to 4.2% in November from 6.2% in February, continuing an unprecedented rate of decline during the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Also, inflation-adjusted GDP surged at an average annual rate of 5.03% in each of the first three quarters of 2021 and is poised to hit 5.6% for the year based on the preliminary estimates of more than 80 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. If that forecast holds up, it would be more than 2.8 times the average performance between 2000 and 2019. And double the average since 1976.

Monday Wake Up Call – December 20, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Early snowstorm, Yosemite NP, CA – December 2021 photo by Don Smith Photography

Everyone’s speeding. Drive any highway in the US and cars are going really, really fast. It’s also true on local roads. For the past 20 years, speeding has been involved in approximately one-third of all motor vehicle fatalities.

In 2020, an estimated 38,680 people died in traffic crashes, the highest since 2007, according to the federal National Highway Safety Administration. That represented a 7% increase in nationwide fatalities at a time when Covid reduced driving activity by 13%. Henry Grabar, a staff writer at Slate, wrote last week about how Americans became obsessed with driving fast, no matter the cost. He quotes a Connecticut state trooper:

“Covid was midnight on the day shift.”

We all experienced how empty the roads were at the height of Covid. Despite the empty roads, in the first six months of 2021, traffic fatalities in the US rose by 18%, the largest increase since the US Department of Transportation started counting, and double the rate of the previous year. And the National Traffic Safety Administration (NTSA) reports that drivers were hitting higher speeds on empty roads. They reported that as trips taken decreased by 50%, speeding increased by 45%. They also reported an approximate one-third increase in speeding above pre-pandemic levels from November 2020 through March 2021.

It’s a paradox: We have laws about driving speeds that no one obeys. We have police who enforce speeding laws without trying to catch everyone. More from Grabar: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Speeding is a national health problem and a big reason why this country is increasingly an outlier on traffic safety in the developed world. More than 1 in 4 fatal crashes in the US involve at least one speeding driver, making speeding a factor in nearly 10,000 deaths each year….Thousands of car crash victims are on foot….The odds of a pedestrian being killed in a collision rise from 10% at 23 mph to 75% at 50 mph.”

This isn’t going away. Americans love driving fast and apparently, have confidence in their own abilities. Grabar reports that about half of drivers admit to going more than 15 mph over the speed limit in the past month. But those same drivers regard other drivers’ speeding as a threat to their own safety.

Distracted driving, particularly involving mobile phones, is a huge problem as well. Cambridge Mobile Telematics reported data from more than 300 million trips, measured between January 2019 and July 2021. They showed that phone distraction jumped by more than 17% in the first month of the pandemic. On weekday evening commutes, it was higher by more than 31%.

Separately, Zendrive presented an analysis showing increases in cell phone use among drivers after the mid-March 2020 start of the public health emergency. Their analyses showed that in more than 16% of the crashes, a cell phone was manipulated less than five seconds before impact.

America has once again landed in the worst of both worlds: Drivers believe in their own skill, but not that of other drivers. We have thousands of speed-related deaths and a system of enforcement that isn’t designed to change behavior all that much.

Let’s leave the last words to Grabar:

“The nation’s most disobeyed law is dysfunctional from top to bottom. The speed limit is alternately too low on interstate highways, giving police discretion to make stops at will, and too high on local roads, creating carnage on neighborhood streets….the lack of political will to do something about it tracks with George Carlin’s famous observation that everybody going faster than you is a maniac and everybody going slower than you is an idiot. The consensus is: Enforce the speed limit. But not on me, please. Because while it would be nice to save 10,000 lives a year, it sure is fun to drive fast.”

Time to wake up America! Maybe you like driving fast while scrolling the internet on your phone, but it may make your life (or the life of a family member, or someone you’ve never met) end badly.

To help you wake up, listen to Queen do their song “Thank God It’s Christmas” originally released in November 1984. It was re-released last week by Brian May and Roger Taylor. They have it right, it’s been a long hard year:

Sample Lyrics:

Oh my love we’ve had our share of tears
Oh my friend we’ve had our hopes and fears
Oh my friends it’s been a long hard year
But now it’s Christmas
Yes it’s Christmas
Thank God it’s Christmas

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Daily Escape

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Monday Wake Up Call – December 20, 2021