Hopper headed over to the fence yesterday hoping to dig a hole into our neighbor’s yard—even though she can get there perfectly well already by jumping over. However, she was foiled by sneaky human technology, so she decided to just plonk down in the dirt and sniff her surroundings. What better way to spend a sunny afternoon?

Bob Somerby points me today to the lastest test scores for New York City students. Here’s an entirely gratuitous chart showing how they compared to the statewide average for 8th graders:

On average, city kids did better than the rest of the state. That’s not bad. Maybe New York City schools aren’t quite the cesspools we’ve been led to believe.

But there’s bad news too. Since 2013, the racial difference in test scores has widened in New York City. Among grades 3-8, the black-white gap has widened by 3.5 points in math and by 1 point in English. And that’s not the only gap that’s growing. Check this out:

The black-white gap has been around forever and it’s a national disgrace. But the male-female gap is nearly as big. I would be curious to see this for 8th graders only since this difference might start to wash out as boys catch up to girls in the maturity department, but although NYC provides grade-level information for lots of things, they don’t have it for this.

From the Wall Street Journal:

President Trump said U.S. companies were “hereby ordered” to start looking for alternatives to doing business in China after Beijing said it would impose tariffs on $75 billion worth of additional U.S. products.

….Mr. Trump’s comments came in response to China’s plan, laid out Friday, to impose tariffs of 5% and 10% on almost all the remaining U.S. imports on which it has yet to impose punitive taxes, including vehicles and car parts, in retaliation against U.S. moves to slap punitive tariffs on an additional $300 billion of Chinese goods. The president demanded that U.S. companies “immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.”

Wait. I thought we had all agreed that nothing Trump tweets is actually an order or anything like it. It’s merely a manifestation of how Trump wants his base to perceive him. In this case, he apparently wants them to perceive him as Albert Speer or something.

Anyway, the president obviously doesn’t have the authority to order US companies to do anything, even if he does use a big word like “hereby.” Still, I assume Republicans will all be shocked and outraged by this megalomaniac attempt to interfere in the free market. Right?

Craig Lassig/ZUMA

As long as I’m looking at climate plans, let’s look at a few others. Elizabeth Warren doesn’t really have a climate plan, but she does have three pieces of a climate plan buried in the 34-point “Latest Announcements” section of her website:

• Invest a total of $2 trillion over the next ten years.
• Require all public companies to disclose climate-related risks.
• Direct the Pentagon to achieve net zero carbon emissions for all its non-combat bases and infrastructure by 2030.
• Create a ten-year, multi-billion dollar R&D program at the Defense Department focused on microgrids and advanced energy storage.
• Spend $400 billion over ten years on clean energy R&D.
• Create a $1.5 trillion program to “purchase American-made clean, renewable, and emission-free energy products for federal, state, and local use, and for export.”
• Designate $100 billion to encourage other countries to purchase and deploy American-made clean energy technology.

This is a hard plan to judge because it’s really only a skeleton. On the downside, nearly all the money goes to subsidies (I assume) for American-made clean energy products. If this were 15 percent of a $10 trillion plan, I might buy it. But three-quarters of a $2 trillion plan? Not so much.

On the bright side, Warren wants to spend $400 billion on R&D. That’s woefully insufficient, but it does represent 20 percent of her entire progam and perhaps demonstrates that she gets the importance of this. Compare this to the Sanders plan for R&D, which allocates more in absolute dollars but represents only 5 percent of his plan—much of it preallocated to specific hobbyhorses.

Finally there’s $100 billion to encourage other countries to use our technology. That’s fine, but the real answer is to fund an R&D program so aggressive that it will produce products other countries want without having to be pushed. They’ll want it solely because it’s cheaper and better than anything they can get elsewhere.

Warren’s plan is too timid by half and it lacks much detail. On the other hand, she allocates 20 percent of her dollars to R&D and doesn’t pretend that she knows in more detail where to direct it. She also wisely avoids gratuitously hitting hot buttons that would feel good but probably reduce support for her plan. Another plus is that her climate change plan is a climate change plan, not a kitchen sink in which to throw every conceivable lefty fetish. Overall I’d give Warren’s plan an Incomplete, but since we’re judging on what’s here right now, I’ll give her a C-.

BY THE WAY: In case you’re wondering, my baseline for seriousness on R&D is about $5 trillion over ten years. This should be the backbone of any climate change plan.

Stefani Reynolds/CNP via ZUMA

Fed chair Jay Powell says our economy’s biggest problem isn’t unemployment or consumer spending or business investment, all of which could benefit from an interest rate cut. Our biggest problem is trade uncertainty, and it’s not clear that a rate cut would help with that:

“While monetary policy is a powerful tool that works to support consumer spending, business investment, and public confidence, it cannot provide a settled rule book for international trade,” Mr. Powell said, speaking from prepared remarks in Jackson, Wyo., at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual symposium.

….“Trade policy uncertainty seems to be playing a role in the global slowdown and in weak manufacturing and capital spending in the United States,” Mr. Powell said, adding that there were “no recent precedents to guide any policy response to the current situation.”

Translation: Donald Trump has only himself to blame if the economy gets wobbly. It’s mostly due to Trump’s own trade war and the uncertainty surrounding it, and there’s really nothing the Fed can do about it. The only person who can is Donald Trump, by cutting some deals and ending the trade war.

But my guess is that once his aides have explained to Trump that Powell was criticizing him, he will double down on his attacks on the Fed and start wailing even harder about how we’re being cheated by the rest of the world. In fact, let’s check. Ah yes, here it is already:

As usual, the Fed did NOTHING! It is incredible that they can “speak” without knowing or asking what I am doing, which will be announced shortly. We have a very strong dollar and a very weak Fed. I will work “brilliantly” with both, and the U.S. will do great…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019

….My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019

Atta boy, Donald. Blame all your idiocies on someone else. It’s always worked before, after all.

Paul Kitagaki Jr./ZUMA

Bernie Sanders released his climate change plan today, and Bernie being Bernie it was naturally the biggest, leftiest, most socialist plan out there. And that was the good part. The bad part is that it’s practically designed to fail.

If you’re going to propose a massive, $16 trillion plan, the first thing you should do is get as many people on board as possible. Instead, Sanders practically revels in pissing off as many stakeholders as possible. He’s going to tax the rich. He’s going to hobble the fossil fuel industry. He’s going to ban nuclear power. He’s going to nationalize electric generation and turn it over to the federal government.

And then there are the absurd promises. He’s going to create 20 million new union jobs. (No he’s not, unless he also creates 20 million new human beings.) He’s going to eliminate fossil fuels by 2030 at the latest. (I don’t think even the most optimistic environmentalist thinks we can build out solar and wind that fast.) Electricity will be “virtually free” by 2035. (Oh please.)

And there’s the spending. Two trillion dollars to weatherize homes. Another two trillion to allow people to trade in their old gas burners for electric vehicles. Half a trillion to replace school buses. A trillion dollars for public transit and high-speed rail. I’m open to expert opinion on this, but everything I know about climate change tells me that this is an enormous amount to spend on things that will have only modest impacts.

But at least Sanders will also dedicate huge amounts to R&D, right? He says right at the top that he’ll make “massive investments” in new research. But down in the details, R&D appears to get $800 billion, only a little more than he’d spend on school buses. This is a wild mismatch. Sanders appears to be more interested in creating a huge federal jobs program than he is in seriously taking on climate change.

The Sanders plan looks to me like the worst kind of kitchen sink proposal: a “plan” that avoids making any hard choices by simply saying that we’ll do everything. Call me cranky, but I’m tired of this stuff. It’s a box-checking exercise designed to appeal to every possible lefty constituency rather than something that has even the remotest chance of building the public support needed to get it passed through Congress.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s probably worth noting that I haven’t looked at the climate plans from other candidates. So I’m not comparing Sanders to anyone else. For all I know, all the other plans are just as bad.

Today is my blogoversary: it’s been 17 years since I wrote my first blog post. This guy on the campus of UC Irvine is so excited about it that he’s doing backflips to celebrate.

Keiko Hiromi/AFLO via ZUMA

The New York Times reports that Rudy Giuliani is renewing his effort to have the Ukrainian government launch a criminal investigation of Joe Biden:

Mr. Giuliani said he was acting on his own as a private citizen, with the knowledge and assistance of the State Department. He would not say whether Mr. Trump approved — or is aware of — the effort.

Hmmm. State Department assistance, you say? Here is NBC News today:

President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani confirmed Thursday that the State Department assisted his efforts to press the Ukrainian government to probe two prominent Democratic opponents of the president: former Vice President Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee….Trump’s attorney confirmed to NBC News that the State Department helped put him in touch with Yermak.

Why is the State Department assisting Rudy Giuliani in his transparent quest to smear a Democratic opponent of the president? Inquiring minds want to know.

This is definitely not the way you’d like to see your alma mater make the front page of the LA Times:

When this story first broke a few days ago, I held out a brief hope that it was about the Pacifica High School in Oxnard. No such luck. And since then it’s just gotten worse. The story has exploded worldwide and the latest news is that “several other videos showing students engaged in hate speech have surfaced.”

On the bright side, that building in the picture is Pacifica’s brand new theater, now the second largest in the Garden Grove Unified School District. Doesn’t it look nice?

I see that Larry Summers has caught up to the state of the art in galaxy-brain thinking:

The one thing that was taught as axiomatic to economics students around the world was that monetary authorities could over the long term create as much inflation as they wanted through monetary policy. This proposition is now very much in doubt. 8/

— Lawrence H. Summers (@LHSummers) August 22, 2019

The high inflation and high interest rates of the 1970s generated a revolution in macroeconomic thinking, policy and institutions. The low inflation, low interest rates and stagnation of the last decade has been longer and more serious and deserves at least an equal response. 27/

— Lawrence H. Summers (@LHSummers) August 22, 2019

The brief stagflation of the ’70s produced a hysteria out of all proportion to its oil-fueled origins. The real lesson of that era is that central banks can crush inflation whenever they want. It’s not easy or painless, but it can be done. Conversely, the lesson of the present era is that producing inflation out of thin air is hard. This means that inflation is an asymmetric threat: we know what to do about high inflation but we don’t know what to do about low inflation. This in turn means we should be less worried about inflation than we are.

But as in so many other areas, the ghost of the ’70s lingers even half a century later. It’s a decade that deserves far more attention than it gets. It is the fountainhead of so much that’s gone wrong with the world since, and we’re still nowhere near over it.