Category: Monday Wake Up Call

Monday Wake Up Call – September 19, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Willard Beach, South Portland, ME – September 2022 photo by Eric Storm Photo

Last week, Wrongo wrote about how if you know a little about politics, your issues are guns, abortion, and taxes. We need to think about adding immigration to that list. Blog reader Craig G. asked, “when is enough, enough?” in response to Wrongo’s column on DeSantis sending immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard.

It’s a great question. We tend to think of immigration as an American/Mexican border problem, but it is much, much worse than that. The UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees reported in May 2022, that the world, for the first time in history, had 100 million forcibly displaced people either in camps or on the move.

Of those who were on the move, “conflict and violence” accounted for 14.4 million, and “weather-related events” accounted for 23.7 million. The distinction between these numbers is often hard to understand. The civil war in Syria for example, produced large numbers of refugees. In 2021, more than 6.8 million refugees were from Syria, more than any other country in the world. At the same time, another 6.9 million people were displaced within Syria. The Syrian civil war followed the most profound drought ever recorded in what used to be the Fertile Crescent.

About 100 million migrants is huge, more than the population of Germany, Turkey or, Vietnam. But it could get worse as the impacts of climate change broaden throughout the 3rd world. The International Organization for Migration has predicted that we could see 1.5 billion people forced from their homes by 2050.

These numbers are staggering. Now couple them with America’s declining birth rate. Econofact reports that the US birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007. They say the decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes. So, what if it continues while the number of people knocking on America’s doors continues to grow?

As Craig G. implies, there could come a time when all Americans will agree to limit immigration. Otherwise, a smaller, aging America will be asking what some on the Right are asking today: Who are the “real” Americans? What do we owe recent immigrants?

The Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1 says:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

How will we adjust when the majority of our population are from different cultures, different races and speak different languages? The children of first-generation immigrants generally are well-adapted to the broad American culture; for the most part, they sound and act like Americans. If they were born here they ARE Americans. But the first generation migrant has an understandably difficult time.

This has caused the Right and specifically, the Christian nationalists on the right to be stingy about who they say is a true American, despite when many kids of immigrants are born here in America.The 14th Amendment doesn’t require any ideological, racial or language prerequisite.

Our low birth rates mean we can’t replace our population, so our economic growth will slow. If we replace our population with immigrants, we’ll have economic growth, but our culture will inexorably change.

Our history gives us some pointers. Immigration to the US peaked in the 19th century in the decade 1880-89 when it reached 5,248,568. The first decade of the 20th century saw another record with 8,202,388 people entering the country. In 1910, 75% of the population of New York, Chicago, Detroit and Boston consisted of first and second generation immigrants.

Remember that the US population was 62,979,766 in 1890, an increase of 25.5% percent since the prior census in 1880.  Contrast that with today. Stastia says that 710,000 legal immigrants arrived here in 2021, and that we had 11.39 million illegal immigrants living in the US at year end 2018. We’re five times larger today.

Think about it: In 1890, our foreign-born population was 9.2 million. The total US population was 62.9 million. 5.2/62.9 = 14.6% of our population were immigrants. In 2018, out foreign-born population is 44.8 million. 44.8/320 million in US = 14.0%. Is our problem worse today?

Time to wake up America! A tsunami of immigrants will try to move from the 3rd world to the developed world. The numbers will be staggering, beyond anything experienced so far by Europe or the US. Our ability to cope with so many people in motion in some even modestly humane fashion will determine the character of our country over the next century.

To help you wake up, listen to John Moreland perform “Ugly Faces” from his 2022 album “Birds in the Ceiling”.

Sample Lyric:

You’re seeing ugly faces in your dreams
Let me know what it means
We told ourselves we’d tell it true
But I learned how to lie, watching you
This dirty place don’t want you here
Looks like you’re stuck another year
You close your eyes, a scene rolls by
A strip mall under sunburst sky
My back was to a corner, lonely in a crowd
I couldn’t hear you calling, the bullshit was so loud

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Monday Wake Up Call – September 12, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Harvest Moon, Cape Cod National Seashore, MA – September photo by Tom Baratz

With all of the media’s coverage of the comings and goings of the British monarchy, Wrongo’s certain that you missed the reviews of a new book, “Slouching Towards Utopia” by Brad DeLong, an economist from UC Berkeley. Dylan Matthews in Vox quotes DeLong from the book:

“The 140 years from 1870 to 2010 of the long twentieth century were, I strongly believe, the most consequential years of all humanity’s centuries.”

Matthews thinks it’s a bold claim. After all, homo sapiens has been around for at least 300,000 years; DeLong’s “long twentieth century” represents 0.05% of that history.

But DeLong says an incredible thing happened during that sliver of time that had eluded our species for the other 99.95% of our history: Before 1870, technological progress was glacial, but after 1870 it accelerated dramatically. More from Vox:

“DeLong reports that in 1870, an average unskilled male worker living in London could afford 5,000 calories for himself and his family on his daily wages. That was more than the 3,000 calories he could’ve afforded in 1600, a 66% increase….But by 2010, the same worker could afford 2.4 million calories a day, a nearly five hundred fold increase.”

DeLong is speaking of the nations of the rich north, not about all nations. He’s saying that food surplus was the key driver of progress. What’s implied is that the greatest difference between the wealthy and everyone else was that the poor were living on the verge of starvation. Those basic economic facts shifted once having enough to eat ceased being society’s most critical status distinction.

Another interesting statistic from the book:

“…the average number of years of a woman’s life spent either pregnant or breastfeeding…has gone down dramatically, from 20 years of a typical woman’s life in 1870 to four years today.”

Most historians present modern history as a long 19th century (from the French revolution in 1789) to the crisis of 1914. Which is then followed by a shorter 20th century ending with the fall of communism. DeLong, by contrast, argues that the period from 1870 to 2010 is best seen as a coherent whole: the first era, he argues, in which historical developments were overwhelmingly driven by economics.

From the Economist:

“…despite the Industrial Revolution…for millennia, technological improvements never yielded enough new production to outrun population growth. Incomes had stuck close to subsistence levels. Yet from around 1870, growth found a new gear, and incomes in leading economies rose to unprecedented levels, then kept climbing.”

DeLong says that economic policy in this period was a duel between the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek, who extolled the power of the free market, and Karl Polanyi, who warned that the market should serve man, not man serving the market.

Before WWI, markets generated rapid growth along with soaring inequality. People pushed back, demanding greater political rights, which they used to pursue regulation of the economy and improved social insurance.

After WWII, a mix of a market economy and a generous safety-net made for a happy marriage of Hayek and Polanyi, improved by Keynes, who said that governments should act to prevent economic recessions. This led to a three-decade post-war period of growth unmatched before or since. DeLong calls them the Thirty Glorious Years; from 1945 to 1975, as the US and Europe recovered from World War II.

But when growth sagged and inflation rose in the 1970s, voters supported politicians promising market-friendly, or “neoliberal”, economic growth reforms, like lower taxes and reduced regulation. But those reforms didn’t keep economic growth high. And they also led to even worse inequality. Still, the US and other rich countries pressed on with them, right up to the 2008 global financial crisis, which marks the end of DeLong’s 20th century.

According to a paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distribution that America experienced in those thirty glorious years stayed constant, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in just the year 2018. That’s an amount equal to nearly 12% of GDP.

Price and Edwards say that the cumulative inequality cost for our 40-year experiment in government-supported income inequality added up to $47 trillion from 1975 through 2018. And probably equaled $50 trillion by 2020.

That’s $50 trillion that would have made the vast majority of Americans far more healthy, resilient, and financially secure.

So, the big unanswered question is: Can we again return to a period where we see both economic growth and equitable growth? It’s highly doubtful. As DeLong says in Time:

“Our current situation: in the rich countries there is enough by any reasonable standard, and yet we are all unhappy, all earnestly seeking to discover who the enemies are who have somehow stolen our rich birthright and fed us unappetizing lentil stew instead.”

The problem here is that our entire culture, economy and even our civilization is predicated around growth and people haven’t known anything else. Hope you’ve enjoyed the ride.

Time to wake up America! We need to reimagine capitalism, our taxation policies and our welfare scheme if we are to survive. Expect a rough adjustment.  To help you wake up, listen, and watch Bruce Springsteen perform “Darlington County” live in London in 2013:

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Monday Wake Up Call – August 29, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Estacada, OR with Mt. Hood – August 2022 photo by Mitch Schreiber Photography

The WaPo has a stunning exclusive story about Trump and the top secret files found in Mar-a-Lago. Apparently, he had been keeping them in the White House residence long before they were moved to Florida, and while in office, he took them on foreign trips: (emphasis and brackets by Wrongo)

“The Archives battle to secure records from Trump began while he was still president, according to records reviewed by The Post. Gary M. Stern, the [National Archives] agency’s top lawyer, began asking the former president’s attorneys to return two dozen boxes in the residency of the White House before he left. In an email Stern wrote to others, Trump’s counsel, Pat Cipollone, agreed with him. But Trump did not return them.”

This paints a troubling picture. First, these boxes had been kept in the residence of the White House for some time. The WaPo quotes Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s former director of communications:

“Any documents that made it to the White House residence were these boxes Trump carried around with him….Usually the body man would have brought them upstairs for Trump….They would get handed off to the residence and just disappear.”

Second, Grisham goes on to say that boxes of documents even went with Trump on foreign travel, following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries  that are considered foreign adversaries. More:

“There was no rhyme or reason — it was classified documents on top of newspapers on top of papers people printed out of things they wanted him to read. The boxes were never organized….He’d want to get work done on long trips so he’d just rummage through the boxes. That was our filing system.”

Wrongo thinks Republicans will say that Trump took the documents when he traveled to satisfy his voracious appetite for reading. There’s not much about Trump that could shock America at this point, except perhaps him going to jail for something related to reading.

And do you think he did his own packing for those trips? Clearly there were staffers who ignored their signed acknowledgment of the criminal penalties for mishandling documents and brought them along because Trump said he wanted them.

It’s clear that many people were aware that Trump liked to keep top secret compartmentalized information nearby. They must have been acutely aware of the danger that might come with that. Has anyone checked to see if there might be more secret documents at his Bedminster, NJ, or New York places?

Sadly, that isn’t the only unbelievable story about Trump’s security breaches today. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is reporting about a woman, fluent in several languages who people at Mar-a-Lago knew as Anna de Rothschild, mingled with Trump and his supporters. She also attended a golf outing with Trump and Sen. Lindsey Graham.

She wasn’t a Rothschild; she was a fake. Apparently, she invented this other Anna. From the Post-Gazette:

“But the 33-year-old woman was not a member of the famous banking family and is now a subject of a widening FBI investigation that has delved into her past financial activities and the events that led her to the former president’s home.”

More:

“A year before the FBI’s spectacular raid of the former president’s seaside home, the woman whose real name is Inna Yashchyshyn, a Russian-speaking immigrant from Ukraine, made several trips into the estate posing as a member of the famous [Rothschild] family while making inroads with some of the former president’s key supporters.”

One suspects that if we knew the entire truth, it would reveal another unthinkable security breach. The ability of Ms. Yashchyshyn (who is the daughter of an Illinois truck driver) to bypass Trump’s security should make the National Security establishment very, very nervous, what with all of those secret documents hardly under lock and key.

And Wrongo thought they let only “the best people” into Mar-a-Lago.

Time to wake up America! Read what Wrongo said here about the potential damage done when the US government has to assume that secret operations have been compromised by mishandling of top secret information. Taken together, these two stories demonstrate clearly why the DOJ and the National Archives were so worried about classified documents stored insecurely by Trump.

To help you wake up, watch, and listen to Larkin Poe, a Nashville-based sister group, (featured once before on the Wrongologist) perform a new song “Georgia Off My Mind” from their album, “Blood Harmony” coming out in November:

Good groove, nice wordplay.

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Monday Wake Up Call – August 22, 2022

The Daily Escape:

A new day at Jockey’s Ridge SP, Nags Head, NC – August 2022, photo by Crystal Calla Photography.

There’s trouble in the Republican Party. They’ve believed the pundits who said that the GOP had a lock on the November mid-terms, but with terrible Senate candidates, along with the Dobbs decision and Biden’s legislative comeback, things are getting very tight. From the WaPo: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Republican Senate hopefuls are getting crushed on airwaves across the country while their national campaign fund is pulling ads and running low on cash….In a highly unusual move, the National Republican Senatorial Committee [NRSC] this week canceled bookings worth about $10 million, including in the critical states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona.”

Sounds serious. The NRSC has had a record fundraising year, bringing in $173 million so far this election cycle. But they’ve burned through much of it. The NRSC’s cash on hand was just $28.4 million at the end of June.

Republican spending has been augmented by Mitch McConnell’s super PAC, which announced a $28 million rescue effort in Ohio, where Republican candidate JD Vance has raised only $1 million in the second quarter and has spent less than $400,000 on ads.

McConnell’s super PAC also moved up by three weeks its spending in Pennsylvania, adding another $9.5 million, for a total of $34 million. The Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman, is building a lead over the Republican candidate, Mehmet Oz.

Many of this year’s Republican Senate candidates haven’t run for office before and have had to deal with nasty and expensive primaries that crushed their favorability ratings. A string of recent polls show Republican candidates in many battleground states trailing, or in toss-up races with well-funded Democratic opponents. From Charlie Pierce: (parenthesis by Wrongo)

“There’s a pretty good chunk of evidence that the Republican Party is currently very nervous about its chances in this year’s elections for the US Senate. When a party’s C47 flies over your state and dumps a massive payload of cash-like ordnance…(you know you’re in trouble).”

The Republicans suddenly have to start using money they’d earmarked for propping up people like Vance, as life support for the campaign of North Carolina’s Senate candidate Ted Budd, who’s in a dead-heat election with Cheri Beasley. Budd’s public statements on a violent insurrection are likely to cause any thinking Republican voter to stay home.

Republicans have climbed back into a familiar box. In 2010, the Republicans blew a chance to take the Senate because they couldn’t resist nominating terrible candidates. For example, Sharron Angle in Nevada suggested that a teenage victim of rape shouldn’t get an abortion but make a “lemon situation into lemonade.” Christine O’Donnell in Delaware finally had to say she wasn’t a witch.

Besides Vance, Republicans this year couldn’t stop themselves from nominating Herschel Walker in Georgia. They also are defending the indefensible incumbent Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, who in a Marquette University Law School poll, is seven points behind the Democrat Mandela Barnes.

While the odds of Democrats holding the Senate are improving, it is still more than possible that some or all of these Republican candidates could be sitting in the Senate next January. It’s certainly possible that big money Republicans will ride to the rescue of their terrible candidates.

And that’s the point. For the GOP, the worse the candidate, the more the Party’s true believers embrace them. That’s how they prove they’re true believers. Eventually, (hopefully already?) this will reach the point of diminishing returns.

Are we there yet? Can we get there before our democracy crashes and burns is the real question.

Time to wake up America! It’s our job to deliver more than 50 seats in the Senate to the Democrats! There are 35 US Senate seats up for election in 2022, of which 14 are held by Democrats and 21 by Republicans. Democrats need to hold serve, and win two-four more!

We have an opening with the GOP choosing shitty candidates and spending their ad money frivolously. But it means Democrats must turn out in large numbers in all of these elections, from Warnock in Georgia to Fetterman in PA, to Barnes in Wisconsin. And don’t forget Mark Kelly in AZ, and Catherine Cortez Masto in NV.

To help you wake up, watch, and listen to “Lily Was Here” performed by saxophonist Candy Dulfer and the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart. Written by Stewart, it was the title track to a 1989 Dutch film called “De Kassière, (The Cashier).” Here it is performed live by Stewart and Dulfer in 1989:

Dulfer was born in the Netherlands. She’s the daughter of saxophonist Hans Dulfer and started to play the soprano saxophone at age six. She’s very very good.

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Tuesday Wake Up Call, Voter Fraud Edition – August 16, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Monsoon season, Sonoran Desert, Tucson, AZ –  August 2022 photo by Rene Martinez

The November mid-term election is 12 weeks away. Some Republicans who do not accept our country’s democratic tenets are focusing on getting elected in the battleground states in an effort to energize a future coup. From the WaPo:

“…in the six critical battlegrounds that ultimately decided the 2020 presidential contest, where Trump most fiercely contested the results…..Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, at least 54 winners out of 87 contests — more than 62% of nominees — have embraced the former president’s false claims.”

As an aside, reporters must stop using the term “election deniers”. It doesn’t convey what these Republicans believe. They know Trump lost, but they tried to steal the 2020 election anyway.

And they’re promising to steal the next one. These people call the government their “enemy”. Now, they’re calling for violence against the FBI. They say our elections can’t possibly be fair, yet they’re doing all they can to make them less fair.

There are many tools in the GOP tool kit to help a state create election-related chaos. They could decertify voting machines or block the electronic counting of ballots. They could empower their legislatures to determine how many of a presidential candidate’s votes are actually counted.

The GOP says that our local electoral processes and voting machines are highly suspect. In 2020 we saw Republican efforts to find voter fraud in several states, all of which failed. Still, in 2022, the GOP persists in saying there are voting machines that flipped votes in 2020 from Trump to Biden.

The gold standard for voting in America is hand-marked paper ballots. They leave a paper trail that is hard to challenge. Today states (including Connecticut where Wrongo votes) use digital scanners to read those hand-marked ballots. The machine tabulators can be checked before voting for accuracy and ballots can be re-scanned in random precincts afterwards to verify totals, along with hand counts.

Verified Voting a non-partisan firm that promotes the responsible use of technology in elections, rates the integrity of voting machines at the county level throughout the US. They have an interactive US map that allows anyone to check the quality of the voting machines in their county. Here’s a screenshot image of that interactive map:

You should go to the interactive map for greater detail. The green portion of the map represents the 69.2% of US registered voters that use highly reliable hand-marked paper ballots. The yellow portion of the map represents the 23.4% of our registered voters that use mostly reliable Ballot Marking Devices (BMD), with marked pre-printed ballots; some print summaries of voter selections, often with those selections encoded in barcodes or QR codes. Together, these account for 92.6% of America’s registered voters.

The red portion of the map represents the 7.4% of American voters who use a less-reliable direct recording electronic (DRE) voting system. DREs allow voters to record their selections directly into computer memory.

Despite what Republicans think, most of America can vote with total confidence that their voting machines are accurate, and that their votes will be counted accurately. So relax Republicans, election fraud just isn’t very possible in the US.

But there are plenty of other shenanigans that can be pulled at the local and state level. And that’s a concern given what the GOP is focusing on for the November mid-terms. They could take away voting rights by canceling voter registrations. They can close polling places or gerrymander more districts. The WaPo has a chart showing how close the GOP is to controlling the voting process in the six battleground states:

By weakening trust in our election system, Republicans are paving the way for America to become a one-party state led by an authoritarian strongman. They intend to take away the single and best power the people have, our vote. These Republicans aren’t election deniers, they’re anti-democracy. If they are elected, they will end democracy as we know it.

Time to wake up America! We can’t leave the vote-counting to people who won’t count all of our votes! America has a long tradition of subverting the voting process and denying millions of people the right to vote, and these Republicans want to take us right back to those days in our past. To stop that, they must be beaten in November’s mid-terms.

To help you wake up, watch, and listen to “Queen Bee” played by Taj Mahal and friends in this Playing For Change video, that features Ben Harper, Rosanne Cash, and many others from around the world.

The tune is from Taj Mahal’s 1997 album, “Señor Blues”, which won a Grammy. It’s an album that Wrongo highly recommends:

 

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Monday Wake Up Call, Inflation Reduction Act Edition – August 8, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Summer storm passes, Grand Teton NP, WY – August 2022 photo by Hilary Bralove

The Senate came into session at 12 pm Saturday, and after a full 24 hours, it paused the vote-a-rama on Sunday for a new prayer. Those are the Senate rules. Then the Senate promptly resumed its vote-a-rama, which ended about 3:15 pm on Sunday. From the WaPo:

“The Senate on Sunday approved a sweeping package to combat climate change, lower health-care costs, raise taxes on some billion-dollar corporations and reduce the federal deficit, as Democrats overcame months of political infighting to deliver the centerpiece to President Biden’s long-stalled economic agenda.”

While most of the Democrat’s reconciliation process proceeded according to plan, Senate Republicans successfully stripped a provision capping the price of insulin in the private marketplace from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) by a 57-43 vote, with seven Republicans (Cassidy, Collins, Hawley, Hyde Smith, Kennedy, Murkowski and Sullivan) voting to keep it in. But the seven GOP votes, plus all Democrats, weren’t enough to reach the 60-vote threshold necessary to pass.

The cap on insulin prices for only those on Medicare remained in the bill since it complied with the rules on reconciliation. Apparently, the Republicans think that if we give people handouts for having diabetes America’s just incentivizing people to get diabetes. Who wants that?

Democrats included a new tax on large companies that currently pay nothing to the US government and added about $80 billion for the Internal Revenue Service to pursue tax cheats. They also approved a 1% tax on companies that buy back their own stock, a practice that many see as detrimental to the economy, that benefits only wealthy shareholders and executives.

After the bill passed, Republicans were predictably outraged. The appropriately-named Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) said:

“It does nothing to bring the economy out of stagnation and recession. But rather, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 gives us higher taxes, more spending, higher prices — and an army of IRS agents…”

And it’s important to note that while Democrats don’t think that Sens. Manchin and Sinema are all that great, don’t forget that this watered down bill was opposed by EVERY SINGLE REPUBLICAN.

There is plenty to crow about in the IRA. Does it contain everything on the progressive wish list? No, but Dems should take the win and stop pissing and moaning about what couldn’t get by Manchin, Sinema and/or the Senate Parliamentarian, and sell the bill hard to the American people.

If Democrats want to deliver even more, they’ll need to improve their margin in the Senate, and hold the House in the November mid-terms.

It’s not enough for Democrats to wait for Republicans to shoot themselves in the foot this fall, even though some candidates can be counted upon to try hard to do just that. Democrats need to be shouting about their successes. Just yesterday, Trump said at CPAC: “You have not good job numbers now”, even though the just-published job numbers were awesome! That has to be countered at every opportunity.

This means a wall-to-wall, multi-pronged messaging campaign, reminding Americans every minute that Republicans can’t be trusted on the economy. And despite where inflation is today, we need to be saying that gas prices are down nearly $1.00/gallon in the last seven weeks.

Maybe John Stewart should become the Dem’s Minister of Information?

We need to say that most GOP candidates support the Big Lie and the impeached coup plotter, Trump. That they’re willing to eliminate the right to an abortion in America. On Friday, Indiana’s Republicans passed and Republican Governor Eric Holcomb immediately signed, a bill that prohibits nearly all abortions from the moment of gestation. Several Republican-controlled states will shortly pass similar laws.

People must, as Tom Sullivan says, “campaign like crazy“, while reminding all Americans that the Party of Lincoln no longer will deliver anything that ordinary people want.

Time to wake up America! We’re at war politically and ideologically with Republicans. The only way to win is to keep defeating them at local, state, and federal levels until they stop trying to force their radical ways on the rest of us. To help you wake up, watch, and listen to the interesting but short-lived group, 4 Non Blondes play their big hit from 1992, “What’s Up”:

Sample Lyric:

25 years and my life is still
Tryin’ to get up that great big hill of hope
For a destination

I realized quickly when I knew I should
That the world was made up of this brotherhood of man
For whatever that means

And so I cry sometimes when I’m lying in bed
Just to get it all out what’s in my head
And I, I am feeling a little peculiar

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Monday Wake Up Call, Recession Edition – August 1, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Monopoly, Revere Beach, MA – From the 2022 Revere Beach International Sand Sculpting Festival. July 24, 2022 photo by Jack Daryl Photography.

From Paul Krugman:

“The US economy is not currently in a recession. No, two quarters of negative growth aren’t, whatever you may have heard, the “official” or “technical” definition of a recession; that determination is made by a committee that has always relied on several indicators, especially job growth.”

Nonetheless, Wrongo predicts that over the next few months, the Big Brain News Pundits will spend mucho time arguing among themselves while we watch, about the meaning of the word “recession“. They will ensure that the word “recession” is said at least once every 30 seconds.

Wrongo brought this up a few weeks ago. Recessions are determined not by pundits but by a committee of economists at the National Bureau of Economics (NBER). The two measures that have had the most weight are real personal income and non-farm payroll employment. So, despite what you’re hearing, it boils down to income and employment. If income and employment turn south, there’s a good chance economic output will be lower. From Robert J. Shapiro:

“Start with employment, which normally contracts in the first two quarters of recessions. Over the first six months of the 1990–91 recession, employment fell by 690,000, or 0.6%. Similarly, over the first two quarters of the recessions of 2001 and 2007–09, employment fell respectively by 761,000 and 426,000 positions, or 0.6% and 0.3%.”

But in the first two quarters of 2022, employment actually grew, increasing by 2,740,000, or 1.8%.

The main factor behind the lower GDP in the second quarter was business inventories. Businesses generally finance increases in their inventories. So as interest rates rose in the second quarter, inventory purchases fell sharply, subtracting 2% from GDP. GDP growth in the second quarter was -0.9%, so inventories accounted for all of the loss of GDP.

Inventories grew. but at a slower pace, bringing about the negative GDP performance. But this change in the rate of growth in inventories is not tied to either employment or to income, so we’re not in a recession, even though GDP fell.

But our bigger economic problem is inflation. Back to Krugman:

“Obviously gasoline prices are down — almost 80 cents a gallon from their mid-June peak. (Remember those scare stories about $6 a gallon by August?)”

We all know that the Big Brain Pundits only really care about how much it costs to fill their gas tanks compared to what it may have cost when some other guy was president. Expect that they will ignore our record low unemployment, and the growth in median wages.

Despite growing slower than inflation, wages are growing at about 5.4% annually. That’s good, although it could be better. Yet, the Big Brains want us all to be worried about the possibility of recession and inflation occurring at the same time. They’re worrying about that old 1970’s bugaboo, stagflation, which is highly unlikely to occur, despite how much Republicans are rooting for it to happen.

If America really wants to stop inflation in its tracks, we know how to nudge prices in the right direction: Implement a windfall profits tax on oil and food companies, whose profits are off the charts, along with their prices. Also, we could pass the corporate minimum income tax that is a part of the proposed Inflation Reduction Act.

How well the Federal Reserve addresses inflation will decide how soon the current economic expansion ends, and a recession begins. Although the economy’s fundamentals are sound, there’s a danger that the Fed’s interest rate hikes may dampen demand and employment too much. That’s a 50/50 call right now.

Time to wake up America! We’re not in a recession, although we may see one in 2023. We don’t have inflation under control yet, although that’s likely to happen within the next year.

To help you wake up, watch and listen to Sir Elton John from his “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour. Wrongo and Ms. Right got to see him in Foxborough, MA last Wednesday, courtesy of daughter Kelly and her partner Bob.

It was Wrongo’s second time seeing Sir Elton, the first was at the Budokan in Tokyo in 1974.

Last Wednesday was a great night with an adoring audience for what seems to be near the end of his touring career. Here’s his final encore from last week’s performance, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” performed on the night we were there:

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Tuesday Wake Up Call, Unhappiness Edition – July 26, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Smoke in Yosemite Valley from the nearby Oak fire – July 25, 2022 photo via Today’s California

At a family party this weekend, my daughter who owns an upscale restaurant, mentioned that while post-Covid, the restaurant is full again, the patrons are much more mean and nasty. That made Wrongo revisit the answers to the latest data on the happiness of Americans from the General Social Survey (GSS), produced by NORC, a nonpartisan research organization at the University of Chicago.

The GSS has been monitoring societal change since 1972. The last GSS survey came out in January 2022. Here’s a significant chart:

Since 1972, the GSS has asked the question: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days–would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” As you can see above, historically the “very happy” people have outnumbered the “not too happy” group by about 3:1 for about 45 years.

But in 2021, the very-happies plummeted from 31% of the population in 2018 down to 19%, while the not-too-happies surged to 24% (the “pretty happys” remained constant at about 57%). For the first time in polling history, Americans are more likely to say they’re not happy than to say they’re very happy.

The Institute for Family Studies (IFS) has taken a look at the GSS data to see what’s driving this precipitous change. Here’s their chart of unhappiness by age:

Until 2018, fewer than 18% of Americans ages 35 and over claimed to be “not too happy”, while fewer than 16% of Americans under 35 had done so. But in 2021, unhappiness rocketed upwards for both groups, to 22% for those 35 and over, and to 30% for those under age 35.

The sharp increase for those under 35 indicates young adults are carrying a unique burden. They’re taking an extraordinarily dim view of the world and their own lives.

Among young adults, different groups had different levels of unhappiness even before Covid. For example, only 6% of married people said they were “not too happy,” versus 16% of the unmarried. The question is whether all groups saw the same spike in unhappiness. Here’s another chart from the IFS:

Unhappiness rose for every group: In each case, the red bars are higher than the blue bars.

In the GSS, social class didn’t protect people very much: Unhappiness rose about 16% for people with prestigious jobs vs. 15% for other people. People who attended college saw their unhappiness rise by 16% vs. 15% for people who didn’t attend college.

Some demographic traits did matter: Men saw their unhappiness rise 18%, vs. 12% for women. Unhappiness rose about 17% for non-Hispanic whites, vs. 12% for racial and ethnic minorities.

Religion seems to have buffered unhappiness. Among people who attended religious services at least two times per month, unhappiness rose only 4%, the smallest increase of any group.

Liberal Americans saw the largest increase in unhappiness of any group, by 19%. For moderates, it was 15%, and for conservatives, 13%. Despite what Tucker Carlson might try to make of this, the IFS says that given the sample sizes involved, those differences aren’t statistically significant.

We can blame the Covid pandemic for much of the increase in unhappiness, but we’ve also seen huge social disruption. Here’s a chart showing the percentage of 25-34 year-olds living with parents or relatives in the US:

In 1970, 11% lived with their parents, while in 2020, it was 29%. Note the decline in living with a spouse. From 80% to 38%. While people are getting married later, living alone is relatively unchanged since 1980.

This has occurred during a period when there was very little upside in real wages, and a huge increase in financial assets, which few young adults have, and in the cost of housing. This may also partially explain why young people are unhappy.

We’re about to head into a global recession and most of our politicians have zero idea how bad it will be, or how to fix it. When it comes to the midterm elections, nearly a third of voters say it doesn’t matter who wins.

Time to wake up America! We’re hoping that demography will save us before climate change slays us, or fascism overtakes us.

To help you wake up, listen to 9 year-old musical prodigy Ellen Alaverdyan perform a cover of Geddy Lee‘s iconic bassline on the classic Rush song “Tom Sawyer”:

Scroll away from the video, and she sounds like a pro. Very nice!

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Monday Wake Up Call, Abortion Editon – July 18, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Barn with cotton candy clouds, Allegre, KY – July 2022 photo by Fuller Perspective Photography

The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe has opened a Pandora’s Box of ethical and legal issues. The infamous story about the pregnant 10 year-old Ohio rape victim who was forced to travel to Indiana to receive an abortion is the best example. It was reported in the Indianapolis Star on July 1.

After the Dobbs decision, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R) had issued an executive order putting in force a 2019 law that had banned nearly all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. The 10-year-old was reportedly six weeks and three days pregnant.

Then we saw a Right-wing smear campaign:

  • A WSJ editorial called the Indianapolis Star’s report a “fanciful tale“, and claimed that there is “no evidence the girl exists.”
  • Tucker Carlson said that the story of the 10-year-old girl who had to travel to Indiana to get an abortion was “not true.”
  • Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said in an interview with USA Today, that the story was likely a “fabrication.”
  • The New York Post, which, like Fox News and the WSJ, is owned by Rupert Murdoch, published an opinion piece by law professor Jonathan Turley under the headline “Activist tale of 10-year-old rape victim’s abortion looks like a lie.”

All of those shouts and murmurs soon disappeared when a 27-year-old man from Columbus, Ohio, Gershon Fuentes, was arrested and charged with impregnating the 10-year-old Ohio girl. Apparently, Fuentes “confessed to raping the child on at least two occasions.”

Subsequently,  the WSJ recanted and published a different editorial correcting the record. Why would they accuse the Star of fabricating a story? From Judd Legum: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“There is a reason why so many people, particularly on the right, were eager to push the idea that Bernard’s story was a lie. If they acknowledged the story was true they would have to answer this question: Do you believe that a 10-year-old rape victim should be forced to give birth?”

By the way, Covid appears to have increased early-onset puberty around the world. Getting your period “early” now means when you’re younger than 8. People who think a pregnant 10-year-old strains credulity should bear this in mind.

The Nieman Lab, a Harvard-based group focused on journalism on the Internet, took the WaPo’s Glenn Kessler, author of their “Fact Checker” column to task for not checking his facts about the Star’s reporting. One of Kessler’s so-called “facts” was: (brackets by Wrongo)

“An abortion by a 10-year-old is pretty rare,” Kessler notes…..[but] The Columbus Dispatch reported that in 2020, 52 people under the age of 15 received an abortion in Ohio.”

Your mileage may vary, but if one under-15-year-old gets an abortion every week in Ohio, it can’t be thought of as “pretty rare”. The press needs to wise up and get the data before diving headfirst to a conclusion.

There are other ways the Dobbs decision will impact lives. Unsure doctors in Texas are already turning away ectopic pregnancies, fearing legal liability. According to The Lily (a WaPo newsletter):

“…a South Texas woman diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy was refused an abortion by her doctor…..she was advised to seek help out of state.”

Under the unclear Texas law, a doctor who removes an ectopic pregnancy that is not actively causing the patient to bleed to death may face legal consequences.

It doesn’t end there. The laws surrounding in vitro fertilization (IVF) could also be facing threats of lawsuits even though these women aren’t seeking abortions. Slate reports:

“Fertilizing eggs in a Petri dish often results in extra embryos, which are usually frozen….Leftover embryos are frequently discarded or donated to research….In some abortion-restrictive states, this may no longer be possible. Louisiana defines “a viable in vitro fertilized human ovum” as a “juridical person which shall not be intentionally destroyed,” and at least five states have introduced bills establishing fetal personhood.”

States probably won’t ban IVF outright, but as some countries have done, they may limit the number of embryos that can be created in an effort to prevent embryo destruction. All of this would make IVF far more difficult and expensive than it is, and it could possibly reduce the number of IVF clinics in those states.

This is the tip of the iceberg of the issues women will have post-Dobbs. Technology will always be ahead of our laws and ethics. Just as will some men’s (and religions’) need to control women.

Time to wake up America! Elect a filibuster-proof Senate this fall. To help you wake up listen to Willie Nile, perform his ode to Covid, “The Day the Earth Stood Still”:

Sample lyric (that could be about the end of Roe instead of Covid)

So if you feel some heartache
And if you feel some pain
And if you see some lonely soul
Standing in the pouring rain
Offer up some kindness
Compassion if you will
And remember well the way it was
The day the earth stood still

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Monday Wake Up Call – July 11, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Penstemon and Paintbrush, with Mt. St. Helens in background – June 2022 photo by Edwin Buske Photography

There are two big economic issues that the media and pundits say will influence the 2022 mid-terms: inflation, and the possibility of a recession.

Let’s start with the scare of a looming recession. Most Americans have been told that a recession occurs when real GDP contracts for two consecutive quarters. Sounds easy to figure out, but this definition wasn’t met in two out of the last three recessions. Some facts: The 2020 downturn lasted just two months, not two quarters. And during the 2001 recession, real GDP didn’t contract for two quarters in a row either.

The difference is that recessions are determined not by pundits but by a group of economists at the National Bureau of Economics (NBER), and they use several measures beyond GDP to make it official. Here’s how they explain it:

“A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, normally visible in production, employment, and other indicators…”

They go on to say that:

“There is no fixed rule about what measures contribute information to the process or how they are weighted in our decisions.”

In recent decades, the two measures that have had the most weight are real personal income and non-farm payroll employment. So, despite what you’re hearing from pundits about GDP, it basically boils down to income and employment. If income and employment turn south, there’s a good chance economic output will be lower.

But after two quarters of 2022, while output is slowing, income and the labor market are both still solid. The WSJ quotes Robert Gordon a Northwestern University economics professor and member of the NBER’s committee that decides on recessions:

“We are going to have a very unusual conflict between the employment numbers and the output numbers for a while…”

The US economy added 1.6 million jobs in the first quarter, and another 1.1 million jobs in the second quarter. Those numbers certainly don’t look recessionary, despite what the media is trying to tell us. U6, which is a measure of underemployment declined -0.4% to 6.7%. This is a new all-time low for U6, which has been tracked since 1994.

It may seem like splitting hairs to talk about the definition of a recession. But we need to be prepared for the coming political scenario where some argue we’re in a recession while others will refute that idea vigorously.

In this mid-term season, things are going to get weird.

Let’s turn to the scourge of inflation. It is among the first stories on the local news every night, but you might not know that as Paul Krugman says:

“The wholesale price of gasoline has fallen about 80 cents a gallon since its peak a month ago. Only a little of this plunge has been passed on to consumers so far, but over the weeks ahead we’re likely to see a broad decline in prices at the pump….what are the odds that falling gas prices will get even a small fraction of the media coverage devoted to rising prices?”

That seems to point to profit taking by the petroleum corporate interests. Have you noticed how much profit they have made lately? ExxonMobil plans to buy back $30 billion of stock this year with the extra money that we all paid at the pump.

Last Friday, PBS talked about a looming wage-price spiral, a neoliberal concept that says rising wages drive prices. But the annualized rate of wage growth, comparing the last three months (April, May, June) with the prior three months (January, February, March), was 4.3%,down from a previous annualized rate of 6.1%.

This is big since the Fed’s plans for aggressive interest rate hikes is based on its concern about a 1970s-type wage-price spiral. It is impossible to have a wage-price spiral when wage growth is slowing. The current 4.3%  wage growth is less than one percent higher than the 3.4% rate in 2019 when inflation was comfortably below the Fed’s 2.0% target.

Retailers are now stuffed to the gills with merchandise. What happened was that all of the product that was stranded at sea has finally reached store shelves. They will hold massive sales this fall to get rid of it, and that will lower prices.

The lockdowns in China are mostly over, last year’s fiscal stimulus has worked its way through the economy, and the Fed has begun sharply raising interest rates.

Krugman feels that as the economy weakens, the prospect for sustained inflation is receding.

Time to wake up America, don’t get demagogued by the scary economic terms that the politicians will throw at you. To help you wake up, let’s listen to Barenaked Ladies – “If I Had a Million Dollars” Live in Michigan in 2007:

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