Donald Trump is mad again:

The European Central Bank cut its key interest rate and launched a sweeping package of bond purchases Thursday that lays the ground work for what is likely to be a long period of ultraloose monetary policy, jolting European financial markets and triggering an immediate response from President Trump.

….In a tweet, Mr. Trump said the ECB was “trying, and succeeding, in depreciating the Euro against the VERY strong Dollar, hurting U.S. exports.”

The ECB said that it wouldn’t raise interest rates “until it has seen the inflation outlook robustly converge” with its target of just below 2%. That is, they consider inflation too low and won’t raise rates until it has risen to 2 percent and stayed there a while. As you can see, inflation in Europe is considerably lower than it is in the US and is headed in the wrong direction:

Inflation in the eurozone area was only barely above 1.0 percent in July and shows no signs of turning around. This is why the ECB is getting kind of desperate.

Of course, Trump does have an alternative that the ECB doesn’t: he can spend money. All he has to do is convince Republicans to pass a big stimulus bill, which would probably accomplish more than any kind of rate cut or quantitative easing from the Fed. If it were directed toward subsidies for solar panels or a middle-class child care tax credit or something like that, he could even get Democrats on board. Unfortunately, Republicans would refuse, and that means Trump would have no one left to blame except his own party. Sad.

Skid row in downtown Los Los Angeles.Kevin Drum

This year’s Academy Award for the most pregnant use of an adverb goes to a Senior Administration Official speaking to the Washington Post about the homeless in Los Angeles:

We’re not rounding people up or anything yet. You guys in the media get too ahead of yourselves.

Quite so. All they’re doing is looking at cavernous storage facilities near the airport that might be used someday for rounding up the homeless. Why is everyone getting so upset already?

This whole charade with Trump and the homeless is hard to figure out. I mean, it’s obvious that Trump can’t actually do anything. The homeless haven’t broken any laws, and they certainly haven’t broken any federal laws. They can’t be swept up off the streets. Nor does the federal government have a police force to sweep them up even if they wanted to. Even Trump isn’t dim enough to think otherwise. So why the kabuki?

The most obvious answer is that Trump is putting on a show for his fans. We wanted to get the homeless off the streets but Democrats fought to keep their squalid, disgusting, disease-ridden camps right on city sidewalks where they’re free to murder your children.

Or is there something more subtle about this that I’ve missed?

Brian Cahn/Zumapress

Elizabeth Warren has a new plan for shoring up Social Security:

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts unveiled a plan on Thursday to give all recipients of Social Security benefits an extra $200 per month and to pay for it by raising taxes on the rich, her latest economic proposal to redistribute wealth in the United States.

….The largest portion of her plan, raising benefits for 64 million recipients by $200 a month, would cost more than $150 billion in its first year. The plan would also fundamentally alter the funding structure of the program, forcing the very rich to pay much more into Social Security in taxes than they would get out of it in benefits, while most Americans would get far more than they pay in.

Hmmm. I like the general idea, but I don’t see much point in raising everyone’s benefits. The middle class and the affluent don’t really need an increase, after all. I’d prefer to add, say, $300 to the benefits of the bottom third and leave it at that. This would cost half as much and do more overall good.

Politically, of course, it would once again leave out the middle class from a Democratic proposal to expand the safety net. I suppose the politics of Warren’s proposal might outweigh the pure economics.

If Donald Trump disagreed with John Bolton about everything, why did he hire him in the first place?  The most common answer to this question revolves around Trump’s basic incompetence and foreign policy ignorance, and that’s fair enough. But there’s something more interesting also going on here.

Trump has two warring traits when it comes to foreign policy. First, he likes to think of himself—and he likes others to think of him—as a tough guy. It’s central to his self-image. Second, he likes to think of himself as a dealmaker. He wants a deal in the Middle East. He wants a deal with North Korea. He wants a deal with China. He wants a deal with Iran.

This is a surprisingly unusual combination. In particular, most conservatives don’t want deals at all. Most of them won’t quite say this outright, but they don’t. We see this over and over, from START to the Law of the Sea to Iraq to Israel. They want to squash their enemies, not compromise with them.

This leaves Trump with no good people to hire. He could hire a dealmaker, but most dealmakers are too dovish for his taste. He can hire tough guys, but he’ll soon learn that they have no interest in deals. There’s hardly anyone around who truly shares Trump’s values.

Which is too bad. One of Trump’s few redeeming qualities is that he genuinely isn’t very keen on military intervention. I suspect this stems more from a fear of losing than anything else, but who cares? At least it’s the right instinct. If he could find a competent NSA who shared his nationalistic impulses but was also eager to make deals with adversaries, he might actually get somewhere.

There are objectively worse companies in the world than Juul, but few that flatly infuriate me as much. Here’s the sick-making ad they’ve been running around the country lately:

The crocodile tears on display here are enough to drown all of Silicon Valley. Practically everything about Juul from the ground up was designed to appeal to teens. The flavors. The design. The packaging. The “adults only” schtick. Everything. As a result, half the high schools in America are buried under an avalanche of Juulers, and Juul is so profitable that even tobacco companies are envious.

Juul’s goal of creating a new addiction for a new generation is obvious to everyone. They don’t have to literally create their own version of Joe Camel to make that clear. But the ghouls behind Juul continue to throw up their hands and declare themselves mystified. Why, they just wanted to do the world a service by helping adults kick the habit. They’re as aghast as any of us that teens have taken to it.

I’d love to see everyone associated with Juul bankrupted, but in the meantime I’ll settle for banning the worst of their products if the Trump administration actually follows through on its promise today:

Trump administration officials said on Wednesday that they would ban the sale of most flavored e-cigarettes, at a time when hundreds of people have been sickened by mysterious lung illnesses and teenage vaping continues to rise.

Sitting in the Oval Office with Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of Health and Human Services, and Dr. Ned Sharpless, the acting Food and Drug Administration commissioner, President Trump acknowledged that there was a vaping problem, and said, “We’re going to have to do something about it.”

Mr. Azar said that the F.D.A. would outline a plan within the coming weeks for removing most flavored e-cigarettes from the market.

It’s a start.

This is a California bluebell, a common wildflower around here. I have a million pictures of them, but there’s something arresting about this one that I can’t quite put my finger on. Whatever it is, though, it’s the reason you’re seeing it instead of one of the others.

The New York Times surprises no one today by reporting that the White House was directly involved in ordering NOAA to agree with President Trump:

Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, told Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, to have the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration publicly disavow the forecasters’ position that Alabama was not at risk. NOAA, which is part of the Commerce Department, issued an unsigned statement last Friday in response, saying that the Birmingham, Ala., office was wrong to dispute the president’s warning.

In pressing NOAA’s acting administrator to take action, Mr. Ross warned that top employees at the agency could be fired if the situation was not addressed, The New York Times previously reported.

Perhaps next the White House will order NOAA to keep the tide from coming in.

Los Angeles has finalized a deal to buy solar power at a record low price:

Under the 25-year deal with developer 8minute Solar Energy, the city would buy electricity from a sprawling complex of solar panels and lithium-ion batteries in the Mojave Desert of eastern Kern County, about two hours north of Los Angeles. The Eland project would meet 6% to 7% of L.A.’s annual electricity needs and would be capable of pumping clean energy into the grid for four hours each night.

The combined solar power and energy storage is priced at 3.3 cents per kilowatt-hour — a record low for this type of contract, city officials and independent experts say, and cheaper than electricity from natural gas.

That comes to $33 per megawatt-hour, which is fully competitive with the current wholesale price of electricity in Southern California:

Obviously Southern California is an especially good region for solar, and not every place can supply solar power at this rate. On the other hand, this is just the beginning: if solar is competitive today, it will be the cheapest source of power in the near future. And that’s happening not a minute too soon.

Apparently the Evil Dex is working: my M-protein level dropped from 0.52 in August to 0.39 in September. I suppose this means I’ll have to come up with a new name for it. Maybe the Janus-faced Dex. Or the Yin-Yang Dex. In any case, two cheers for the dex.

This picture of a homeless man in Beverly Hills was taken on Wilshire Boulevard, which at various points is nicknamed the Miracle Mile, Park Mile, and Millionaire’s Mile. This particular stretch, between El Camino and Beverly Drive, has no nickname, but is ringed by the Beverly Hilton to the west; Holmby Hills to the northwest; Coldwater Canyon to the north; the Viceroy L’Ermitage to the northeast; Spago to the east; Beverly Vista Elementary School to the southeast; the Hillcrest Country Club to the south; and Beverly Hills High School to the southwest. The zip code here is 90210, the one made famous by the TV show. Average household income is $300,000.