Bayne Stanley/ZUMA

Bloomberg reports that China and the US are planning to keep all the tariffs they imposed on each other during Donald Trump’s trade war. However:

China is considering a U.S. request to shift some tariffs on key agricultural goods to other products so the Trump administration can sell any eventual trade deal as a win for farmers ahead of the 2020 election, people familiar with the situation said. The step would involve China moving retaliatory duties it imposed starting last July on $50 billion worth of U.S. goods to non-agricultural imports.

….The people didn’t specify which other goods would receive higher tariffs instead of agricultural products.

Hmmm. What kind of goods would Trump actively like to see hurt by Chinese tariffs? Via Tyler Cowen, Bill Bishop tells us:

Talk is going around DC that the US and China may keep the original $50B in tariffs, but that the Trump Administration has asked the Chinese to move theirs away from targeting the GOP base to less politically sensitive sectors, even proposing alternative industries to the Chinese side.

If it’s away from the GOP base, then it’s probably toward the Democratic base. Maybe Trump will ask China to target all the stuff made in the Democratic districts of California, the state he hates with the heat of a thousand suns. If his trade war is basically going to last forever, he might as well get some personal satisfaction out of it, amirite?

LOL. But you never know. The media already fell for this trick once. Maybe they’ll fall for it again.

I assumed everyone knew this, but now I’m beginning to wonder. So: this whole business of busing asylum seekers to sanctuary cities is just Donald Trump trolling the Democrats. You all get this, don’t you? It’s not actually a serious proposal that anyone needs to analyze. It’s aimed at his base, which thinks this is just the cleverest thing ever.

Dan Balz says no one has a great immigration policy on offer:

President Trump’s immigration policies have been a failure. His goal of sealing the border has come to naught, and a mass of asylum seekers has overwhelmed the system. Trump has sought to blame others, including the Democrats, for the problem. Democrats cry foul, but they too struggle for an effective answer.

That wouldn’t be surprising. It’s a tough problem, after all. Still, there’s this:

There was no crisis on the border until Donald Trump entered office and set about to create one. So maybe the only policy we really need is “Get rid of Trump.”

It’s also worth noting that Democrats have supported several compromise immigration plans over the years, but Republicans have always crushed them. So maybe we actually need two policies: “Get rid of Trump and get rid of Republicans.” I realize this isn’t the 50-page white paper that we all expect from Democrats, but sometimes you really only need a sentence or two.

These pictures of cats stalking along the fence never get old. They look so serious. And check out those whiskers! Très magnifique.

OK then:

President Trump said Friday that his administration is giving “strong considerations” to a plan to release immigrant detainees exclusively into “sanctuary cities,” reviving a proposal that White House officials insisted had been rejected months ago after only informal consideration.

Put aside the fact that this would be illegal and just consider what signal it would send. Trump would be loudly proclaiming that if you come to the United States to seek asylum, we will put you into a comfy American bus and send you to a city where you will be given food and shelter. Everyone there will try to help you find work and provide lawyers to help with your asylum request. That should certainly stop the brown hordes from swarming to America seeking asylum!

Look, I get that Trump is just saying this to impress his fan base, but how stupid is this? Even for Trump, pretty stupid.

As we all know, opioids are overprescribed in the US and there’s been a big push for many years to cut back. So how are we doing? Are doctors limiting opioids too much? Here’s some data from a recent JAMA article, “Trends and Patterns of Geographic Variation in Opioid Prescribing Practices.” First, the total number of opioid prescriptions:

Opioid prescriptions are down 25 percent since their peak in 2012. That’s fairly substantial. However, although the average strength of each prescription (measured in the equivalent of milligrams of morphine) has stayed roughly constant, the average length of an opioid prescription has been getting steadily longer. This means that the reduction in prescriptions isn’t quite as large as it seems at first glance:

This is down 16 percent since the 2012 peak. The number of prescriptions for less than three days has declined while the number for more than 30 days has increased. Here’s the same information by state:

More than half of the decline in opioid prescriptions came in a single year, 2017, and we don’t have figures for 2018 yet. If it shows another steep drop, it will suggest that we really have cut way back on opioid prescriptions.

File photo of Donald Trump with his sister Maryanne and brother Robert.Sonia Moskowitz/Globe Photos via ZUMA

I almost forgot to write about the stink of scandal now surrounding Donald Trump’s older sister, Maryanne Barry. You may recall that the New York Times published a big story last year about the Trump family business and the likely tax evasion it practiced for years. Donald was the focus of the story, of course, but the tax evasion benefited all the Trump kids, including Maryanne. It’s too late to litigate any of this, but not too late to open a judicial ethics investigation against a sitting judge—which Maryanne Barry is.

So ten days after the ethics investigation was opened, Maryanne retired. That made the ethics investigation moot and it’s now been closed. But it certainly provides yet another reason to believe that sleazy tax shenanigans are at the core of why Donald Trump refuses to release his tax returns. This is why he’ll probably fight all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the public from finding out what he was really up to during his business career.

Jim Loscalzo/CNP via ZUMA

Just when you think Donald Trump can’t surprise you anymore with his boorish behavior, he takes things to a whole new level:

White House officials have tried to pressure U.S. immigration authorities to release detainees onto the streets of “sanctuary cities” to retaliate against President Trump’s political adversaries, according to Department of Homeland Security officials and email messages reviewed by The Washington Post….House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s district in San Francisco was among those the White House wanted to target, according to DHS officials. The administration also considered releasing detainees in other Democratic strongholds.

….The attempt at political retribution raised alarm within ICE, with a top official responding that it was rife with budgetary and liability concerns, and noting that “there are PR risks as well.” After the White House pressed again in February, ICE’s legal department rejected the idea as inappropriate and rebuffed the administration.

I don’t even know what to say about this stuff anymore. Immigration hawks all voted for Trump because he kept chanting “Build the wall,” seemingly unaware that he was doing it only because it got loud cheers at his rallies and Trump loves it when people cheer for him. Beyond that, he has no clue about policy beyond a desire for revenge against anyone who’s ever crossed him. Why the hawks ever thought he’d follow through with something that might actually reduce illegal immigration remains a mystery.

As for dumping asylum seekers onto the streets of Democratic districts, it’s politics on the level of a third-grader. But it doesn’t matter. I assume, as usual, that virtually no one in the Republican Party will say a peep about it.

Yesterday I talked about how difficult it is to settle on reliable figures for housing costs in large urban areas. Here’s another example, this time focusing on New York City. There are, at a minimum, four widely-used housing indexes:

• Case-Shiller home price index
• Case-Shiller condo price index
• BLS inflation of primary residence index (includes Newark and Jersey City)
• HUD 50th percentile rent estimate

Here they all are on a single chart. The dashed black line represents overall inflation:

If you look just at home prices, there’s been no rise at all. Compared to inflation, home prices fell in the 90s, skyrocketed in the aughts, and ended up flat. However, if you look at the inflation rate for primary residences, which includes all forms of housing, it’s now about 20 percent higher than overall inflation. Ditto for the HUD estimate of average rents. Then there’s the Case-Shiller condo index, which is currently about 40 percent above the overall inflation rate compared to where it was in 1987.

But what if you don’t care about long-term history? You just want to see what housing prices look like over the past few years. Here you go:

This time, both the BLS inflation index and the Case-Shiller housing index suggest that housing prices have decreased over the past decade. Apartments and condos, conversely, have risen, but are still only about 5 percent more expensive than they were in 2010.

So which one of these best represents the price of housing in New York City? Or are they all wrong?