Over at National Review, Michael Strain chides Democrats for continuing to be obsessed with growing income inequality:
Income inequality has been growing at a much slower pace over the past ten years. Has anyone noticed? Beyond stabilizing, according to some measures, inequality has actually fallen since the beginning of the Great Recession.
Hmmm. The single best source for a quick but rigorous look at income inequality is the Congressional Budget Office. Their latest report on income distribution goes through 2014 and it looks like this:
Technically, Strain is right. Compared to the beginning of the Great Recession, income inequality is down. But come on. It’s true that rich people took a big hit in capital gains income when the housing bubble imploded, but they’ve taken hits like that before and they’ve always bounced back. The same thing has happened this time. After a big loss, the rich began bouncing back almost immediately. Since 2010, their incomes have gone up by nearly half while the incomes of everyone else have declined. There’s no special reason to think this hasn’t continued since then. Most likely, income inequality in 2018 is higher than it was even at the height of the housing bubble.
There are ways to make this picture look better. If you include income from social welfare programs, incomes of the non-rich have been flat since the Great Recession, not down. Is that solace? Maybe a little, but not much.
Basically, the trendline showing the incomes of the affluent is an inexorable upward line since 1980 with a couple of spikes during the dotcom and housing bubbles. It just keeps rising and rising, and it’s still rising today. That said, I partly agree with Strain’s conclusion:
Part of the reason inequality features so prominently in the national conversation may have less to do with the rich and more to do with the lack of employment opportunities (until very recently, at least) and income growth experienced by many Americans….[Since 2007] median income grew by just 0.2 percent per year. It’s understandable to conclude, correctly or not, that others are doing better than you if your income is growing that slowly.
Whether the size of the gap matters more than the absolute economic condition of non-rich Americans is critical. Each implies different policy responses that are often in conflict. If the gap matters, then policies that shrink it are good. For example, raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour and significantly strengthening labor unions may be good, because they will raise the earnings of many incumbent workers. But if we care about the economic condition of lower-income Americans, then these policies are counterproductive because they will reduce their employment opportunities. In the conflict between promoting income equality and increasing employment opportunities for lower-income Americans, I side with employment.
I agree that income growth for middle-class workers is ultimately more important than than raw income inequality. However, I very much doubt that labor unions and higher minimum wages are, on net, bad for the middle class. The disemployment effects of these policies appear to be pretty low, which the income-enhancing effects appear to be pretty large. I’m happy to consider other policies too, such as job subsidies, but the perfect should never be the enemy of the good. Nearly every policy worth its weight in white papers has some drawbacks. In the end I vote for all of the above: higher top marginal taxes, increases in the minimum wage, more union power, job subsidies, and anything else we can think of.
There’s no point in excerpting or commenting on Donald Trump’s latest bit of blather. Just click and read as you sydh. The guy is still obsessed with all the same twaddle: his greatness, his endorsements, his Air Force One victory, steam catapults, clean coal, the record-setting economy, massive levels of corporate investment thanks to his awesome leadership, etc. etc. And keep in mind: this boasting isn’t for public consumption. This was in a closed-door meeting of cabinet-level officials. This is cretinism beyond belief.
Today brings some bad news for Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security. Border apprehensions were up yet again in May:
It turns out that bluster and threats will apparently scare people away for a few months, but after that you need actual policies to keep the numbers down. Unfortunately, Trump’s idea of “policy” is to scream at his Secretary of Homeland Security:
Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, told colleagues she was close to resigning after President Trump berated her on Wednesday in front of the entire cabinet for what he said was her failure to adequately secure the nation’s borders, according to several current and former officials familiar with the episode….Mr. Trump’s anger toward Ms. Nielsen, who was sitting several seats to his left at the meeting, was part of a lengthy tirade in which the president railed at his cabinet about what he said was its lack of progress toward sealing the country’s borders against illegal immigrants, according to one person who was present at the meeting.
That was last month, and now things are even worse. Nielsen is really in for it now.
BY THE WAY: If you’re wondering why other sources say that border apprehensions were “over 50,000” last month, it’s because that number includes people who present themselves at ports of entry and are turned away. The numbers in my chart are solely people who are apprehended after crossing illegally into the United States.
So professional. The backstory here is that a few weeks ago an Atlantic reporter revealed that Pruitt had asked for permission to raise the salaries of two of his favorite staffers, both of whom had followed him to DC from Oklahoma. Even though he was turned down, Pruitt gave them raises anyway. Millan Hupp, a 26-year-old scheduler, ended up making $114,590 until the Atlantic story came out and Pruitt was forced to rescind the raises.
Obviously Wilcox takes this personally, which is why he told Elaina Plott she was a piece of trash when she called for comment today about Hupp’s resignation. But he must have missed this part:
According to one top EPA official, the 26-year-old was “tired of being thrown under the bus by Pruitt,” and weary of seeing her name constantly appear in headlines about the agency. Officials began drafting her resignation paperwork on Monday morning, just after portions of her congressional testimony were made public.
Pruitt must be a real shitbag. Hupp has worked for Pruitt for several years, and even without the raise she was making $86,460 at age 26. That’s not bad for a 2014 graduate of Oklahoma State University majoring in Hotel and Restaurant Administration. Pruitt must have treated her pretty badly to finally get her to quit what’s really a pretty plum job.
In a poll by Ipsos Reid in 2012, the War of 1812 was second only to their universal health care in a list of events or items that could be used to define Canadian identity.
Not the Mounties? Not ice hockey? Not curling? Not Justin Bieber? Naturally I had to look up this poll:
This bit of internet research into Canadian identity and the War of 1812 was prompted by reports of a phone call last month between the idiot-in-chief and Justin Trudeau about why the US suddenly considered Canada to be a national security threat. “Didn’t you guys burn down the White House?” Trump asked, in what he must have thought was the height of wit. As it happens, Canadians take the War of 1812 a whole lot more seriously than we do, so even on its own terms it was a dumb joke. Plus it was British soldiers who burned down the White House anyway. Plus the Canadians really don’t think this business of being considered a national security threat is a laughing matter.
I wonder when everyone is going to learn? I know it’s easy to sit at my desk and advise world leaders to tell Trump off, but really, they should tell Trump off. It’s the only thing that works. Forbearance and good personal relations get you nowhere with Trump, as Trudeau, Shinzo Abe, Emmanuel Macron, and others have all learned. Just tell him to call back when he’s ready to talk like an adult and then hang up the phone. I don’t think that even most Americans would take offense.
I am laughing so goddamn hard at this video of Trump inexplicably putting his water bottle on the floor, and Pence immediately doing the same for no reason whatsoever. pic.twitter.com/qEFPzKClYj
This is the moon and Venus at sunset. It’s not an entirely realistic depiction, but that’s mainly because I didn’t alter it. In real life, Venus appears much brighter than this, but an exposure that captures the moon properly makes Venus appear dimmer than it really is.
Plus there’s the fact that I made the moon bigger just because I felt like it. Aside from size, though, it’s the actual moon from that image. Basically, I fixed the exposure manually to capture the moon properly (pro tip: f/11 at a shutter speed of 1/ISO usually works) and then took pictures until that exposure also captured the sunset well. Venus was the only loser from this because there was no single exposure that would get all three right at the same time.
ABC News reports today that the Justice Department’s inspector general plans to slam James Comey for publicly reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email just a few days before the 2016 election:
One source told ABC News that the draft report explicitly used the word “insubordinate” to describe Comey’s behavior. Another source agreed with that characterization but could not confirm the use of the term.
….The draft of Horowitz’s wide-ranging report specifically called out Comey for ignoring objections from the Justice Department when he disclosed in a letter to Congress just days before the 2016 presidential election that FBI agents had reopened the Clinton probe, according to sources. Clinton has said that letter doomed her campaign.
Before Comey sent the letter to Congress, at least one senior Justice Department official told the FBI that publicizing the bombshell move so close to an election would violate longstanding department policy, and it would ignore federal guidelines prohibiting the disclosure of information related to an ongoing investigation, ABC News was told.
….ABC News has confirmed that Horowitz’s draft report went on to criticize senior FBI officials, including Comey and fired FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, for their response to the late discovery of a laptop containing evidence that may have related to the Clinton investigation….It took weeks for the FBI to start analyzing the laptop’s contents, and Horowitz’s draft report criticized senior FBI officials for how long the laptop languished inside the bureau, sources told ABC News.
This is going to be such a clusterfuck when it’s released. Comey obviously deserves censure for influencing the election in the face of nearly unanimous advice to the contrary. At the same time, I’m really not sure I can stand to watch as Trump and his fellow Republicans pretend to be outraged over the fact that Comey was responsible for making Trump president. Maybe the IG can give me a heads up about the release date so that I can plan to be at the North Pole that day photographing penguins. Or polar bears. Or vast expanses of ice. Or whatever they have there. Anything would be better than paying attention to the news that day.
No such luck, though. Hell, he’ll probably release it on a Thursday, so that I not only have to face it, but I’ll be awake for 40 hours straight to take in every last hypocritical utterance. If I don’t make it out alive, somebody please tell my family that I love them.
President Trump on Wednesday commuted the sentence of Alice Marie Johnson, a woman serving a life term for a nonviolent crime, after meeting with reality television star and socialite Kim Kardashian West last week to discuss her case. The action was the latest in a recent string of pardons and other acts of clemency from Trump, and aides haves suggested that more could soon be on the way.
Just in case anyone is tempted to praise Trump for this, please don’t. Sure, Johnson deserved to have her sentence commuted in some way, and I’m happy for her personally. But Trump has turned the pardon power into a cynical PR tool and this is just more of the same. The pardon power isn’t meant to be a lottery played out at the whim of a man-child in the White House who’s discovered a shiny new toy.
Maybe it’s time to fix our justice system for everyone and repeal the presidential pardon power entirely. Enough’s enough.
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