Sunflowers and birch trees at the Sand Canyon wash.

In news that will probably surprise no one, EPI tells us today that the wages of the poor go up when states raise their minimum wage:

I’m still not really on board with the $15 minimum wage movement, but I’m on board with a federal minimum of $12. A lot of liberal economists will say that the EITC is a better mechanism for raising the income of the poor, and generally speaking that’s true. However, the EITC and the minimum wage tend to help different classes of people. A combination of a strong minimum wage and a strong EITC is really the best way to go.

Things are a little slow today, so let’s take a look at the 2018 Corporate Reputation Poll from Harris. First, here’s their complete list:

There are a few interesting things to note:

• Americans really love their supermarkets. They’re all in the top 25.
• Americans really hate their cable companies. They’re all in the bottom 25.
• Americans really love Amazon. And Wegmans. I have some friends who were bereft when their Wegmans closed down. What’s the deal with that?
• The Trump Organization managed to avoid the last spot. They were beat out by (a) the airbag company, (b) the sexual harassment company, (c) the clueless credit reporting company that lost everyone’s personal data to hackers, and (d) the ripoff banking company. However, they scored worse than (a) the GMO seed company, (b) the oil spill company, (c) the other clueless credit reporting company, and (d) the vampire squid company.
• The marcom folks who created this graphic used slightly larger fonts in the first two lists, which is why all four aren’t the same size. This is poor graphic design.

With that out of the way, let’s take a look at a few specific sectors. First up, car companies:

Tesla is on top, but that’s not going to last long if they can’t figure out how to manufacture the Model 3 properly. Also note that Fiat Chrysler has an even worse reputation than Volkswagen, which has been fined billions of dollars for the enormous con it pulled on its diesel cars. Nice work, Fiat! Next up is high-tech companies:

Are you surprised that Microsoft is #1? They may be boring, but apparently people think highly of them. (Amazon would be #1 if I counted them as a high-tech company, but I’m not really sure what sector they belong in these days.) Facebook, on the other hand, makes people pretty suspicious—and rightfully so.

Finally, here’s the sector where reputation is truly the coin of the realm: consumer packaged goods.

I don’t really have an explanation for any of this. Why is Kraft #1? Why is Pepsi the lowest? Do most people even know what Unilever is?

Atrios on torture:

If I was involved in this stuff and avoided prosecution…I’d count my blessings and not think, “hey, maybe I should stick around and pursue the highest job in order to ensure that I would have renewed media scrutiny for all that torture.” … The problem isn’t simply that these people weren’t prosecuted (though they should have been). It’s that they weren’t even shamed enough to think that maybe the public spotlight wasn’t the best thing for them.

So why didn’t that happen? Unfortunately, I think public polling offers us all the explanation we need:

The American public supports torture by a pretty wide margin, and Republicans support it almost unanimously. This means there’s really not much reason for anyone to feel ashamed about it or to think it will hurt their reputation or their ability to work in government.

The bottom half of the poll graphic explains why so many people feel this way: they’re scared. This is hard for people like me to understand: It never even occurs to me to feel scared in any of the situations they asked about. At airports I mostly feel annoyed. At movies I mostly wish Hollywood made better stuff. At sporting events I wish the guy in front of me wasn’t wearing a big hat.

But scared people support bad policies. They support interning people of Japanese ancestry. They support napalm and carpet bombing. And they support torture. The only way to change this is to figure out a way to make people less scared. Obviously we haven’t done that yet.

The CDC released its latest quarterly estimate of the uninsured today, which covers the period up through Q3 of 2017:

UPDATE: I’ve been publishing this chart for years, but suddenly everyone thinks it’s misleading because it starts at 9 percent. I will have more to say about this later, but here’s the same chart with a y-axis that starts at zero:

Is this better? I’m not so sure. END UPDATE

Since 2015, the CDC’s estimate of the uninsured has been stable at 10-11 percent. This is pretty obviously the final steady-state result of Obamacare, and it represents a drop of 6 percentage points since 2013, or about 17 million people. We only have 28 million to go to get everyone covered.

And as long as we’re on the subject of CDC stats, here’s one showing the rise in the number of people getting flu shots every year:

I’m a little surprised the number is so low for the non-elderly, though I’m not one to talk. It was only a few years ago that I ever bothered to get one. I wonder what the big dropoff in 2004 was all about? Ah, wait: according to the technical notes there was a flu vaccine shortage that year. The funny thing is that it seemed to have a surprisingly long-term effect. Just by eyeball, it looks like it took about five years for the number of people getting a flu shot to catch up to its old trendline.

Even for Donald Trump, this is a weird story. Here’s the setup:

President Trump boasted in a fundraising speech Wednesday that he made up information in a meeting with the leader of a top U.S. ally, saying he insisted to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that the United States runs a trade deficit with its neighbor to the north without knowing whether that was the case.

“Trudeau came to see me. He’s a good guy, Justin. He said, ‘No, no, we have no trade deficit with you, we have none. Donald, please,’ ” Trump said, mimicking Trudeau, according to audio obtained by The Washington Post….“I said, ‘Wrong, Justin, you do.’ I didn’t even know….He said, ‘Nope, we have no trade deficit.’ I said, ‘Well, in that case I feel differently,’ I said, ‘but I don’t believe it.’ I sent one of our guys out, his guy, my guy, they went out, I said, ‘Check because I can’t believe it.’ ”

So far, this is typical Trump: bragging about how ignorant he is but supposedly getting the better of his oh-so-urbane counterpart anyway. But then “his guy” comes back with the numbers:

‘Well, sir, you’re actually right. We have no deficit but that doesn’t include energy and timber … And when you do, we lose $17 billion a year.’ It’s incredible.”

Energy? Timber? WTF is that supposed to be about? Here’s our actual trade deficit with Canada:

For the past three years, we’ve had a trade deficit in goods with Canada of about $20 billion, mostly because we import lots of oil and natural gas from them (about $70 billion in 2017). But that’s only tangible goods. We export a lot of services to Canada (financial services, computer services, etc.), and as a result we’ve been running a total trade surplus of about $5 billion. This is what Trudeau was talking about. It has nothing to do with timber, and the number $17 billion doesn’t show up anywhere.

This information takes about five minutes to look up. What kind of “guys” does Trump have who come back to him with a cockamamie story like this? Or did they come back with the real numbers and now Trump is just inventing a tall tale about his triumph over Justin Trudeau? Or what? Can anyone out there make any more sense of this story than I can?

POSTSCRIPT: Also, if this story is anywhere close to true, can you just imagine what Trudeau told his people when he got back? I would love to have been a fly on the wall for that debrief.

Jeff Malet/Newscom via ZUMA

Gabriel Sherman reports that Donald Trump met with John “Let’s Bomb Iran!” Bolton a few days ago to discuss hiring him as National Security Advisor:

Sources added that Trump spent much of the time with Bolton fuming that McMaster was speaking privately with Barack Obama’s former national security adviser Susan Rice. “Trump kept saying, ‘Can you believe it? To Susan Rice? Can you believe it?’ ”

I wonder how Trump knew this? Surely H.R. McMaster wasn’t foolish enough to tell him—or anyone else, for that matter? Susan Rice has been a Republican bogeyman ever since they made idiots out of themselves trying to pretend that Rice was responsible for deliberately misleading the nation about Benghazi. Trump, of course, doesn’t know Susan Rice from Rice-a-Roni, but he knows that she’s bad, and that therefore it’s bad that McMaster talks to her occasionally.

Then there’s this:

Sources said Trump has discussed a plan to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions. According to two Republicans in regular contact with the White House, there have been talks that Trump could replace Sessions with E.P.A. Administrator Scott Pruitt, who would not be recused from overseeing the Russia probe.

This would be Pruitt’s dream come true, but it would be a horror show for everyone else. For all his faults, Sessions does have a sense of integrity about applying the law. Pruitt has no such constraints. He is consumed solely by ambition and a hatred of liberals, and he would do whatever Trump wanted.

In other news, Trump has hired TV economist Larry Kudlow to head up the National Economic Council. Here is Kudlow’s background: he has a BA in history and a long history of blathering about supply-side economics on TV and radio. He should fit right in. If all of these moves take place, it would mean:

• Rex Tillerson, H.R. McMaster, Jeff Sessions, and Gary Cohn

  have been replaced by

• Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Scott Pruitt, and Larry Kudlow.

And you thought Team Trump couldn’t get worse? Think again.

Remember this from the 2016 Republican Convention? Good times.Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

As part of his bizarre obsession with the 2016 election, Donald Trump has insisted for a long time that deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe conspired against him during the campaign. Why? Pay close attention:

• McCabe’s wife is a Democrat.
• She ran for office in Virginia a few years ago.
• Like all Democrats, she got help from then-governor Terry McAuliffe.
• McAuliffe is famously one of Hillary Clinton’s good buddies.
• Therefore McCabe was in league with Hillary to defeat Trump. This is why Hillary was never charged in the email case even though we all know she was totally guilty and should have spent the rest of her life in prison.

Trump has tweeted more than once that McCabe should be fired, and now he’s close to getting his wish:

Mr. McCabe is ensnared in an internal review that includes an examination of his decision in 2016 to allow F.B.I. officials to speak with reporters about an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The Justice Department’s inspector general concluded that Mr. McCabe was not forthcoming during the review, according to the people briefed on the matter. That yet-to-be-released report triggered an F.B.I. disciplinary process that recommended his termination — leaving Mr. Sessions to either accept or reverse that decision.

For what it’s worth, note that McCabe was arguing in favor of investigating the Clinton Foundation, which would hurt Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump. Whatever. So what is it that McCabe supposedly did wrong?

The details of why the inspector general viewed Mr. McCabe as not forthcoming are not clear.

Anyway, McCabe is scheduled to retire on Sunday, but if he gets fired on Friday instead it will reduce his retirement benefits. Trump actually tweeted a few months ago that he thinks it would be outrageous if McCabe got his full benefits:

FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go?!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 23, 2017

Our government is being run like a mafia family. A very, very petty mafia family.

In honor of Pi Day, today’s lunchtime photo comes a little early. This is a picture of Interstate 5 as you make the final descent into the San Joaquin Valley after crossing the Grapevine. Like pi, it seems to extend to infinity, going on forever and ever.

Not impressed? Sorry, it was the best I could do. I racked my brain for pi references I could make to any of the photos in my queue, but came up empty. So this is it.

By the way, today is also Albert Einstein’s birthday. He is, of course, famous for the definition of pi in his general theory of relativity, which he first wrote down while reviewing a patent application for a system of synchronized pie tins connected via telegraph wires:

This was a technical correction to Isaac Newton’s definition of pi, which occurred to him when he got bonked on the head by a falling apple:

In practice, Newton’s definition of pi is still used by working physicists today. Einstein’s definition is needed only for pies the size of the solar system.

BY THE WAY: Today is American Pi Day. In Europe, where they typically write the month first, 314 is April 31st, which is the day after April 30th, which is May 1st. Then there’s (American) Two Pi Day, which is on June 28. It’s even better than Pi Day because everyone gets two pies.

ALSO: Congratulations to St. Louis, which scored the coveted 314 area code back in 1947, and Marin County, which snagged the 628 area code just a few years ago.

Brian Cahn via ZUMA

Just for the record, all the absentee ballots have finally been counted in the Pennsylvania 18th district special election, and Conor Lamb is the winner by 627 votes. All that’s left now is to see if Republicans try to overturn the decision via a recount.