The two biggest employers of the working poor are retail and leisure (including restaurants), which are good proxies for the overall economic health of low-income workers. Here’s how they’ve been doing:

In both cases, average weekly earnings have recovered to their pre-pandemic level. Among retail employees, average earnings are actually about $30 per week higher than before the pandemic. So if you still have a job in these industries, you’re doing OK.

Fine. But how many people still have jobs?

Both retail and leisure have suffered job losses. Leisure, in particular, has cratered, losing 8 million jobs at its worst point and still down by more than 4 million jobs today. Now let’s take a look at the big picture:

Overall national income is in good shape. The lesson here is simple: we don’t need $1,200 checks that go out to everyone. We don’t really need a lot of generic stimulus spending at all. Overall income is in good shape thanks to the CARES Act, and as long as you still have a job even the working poor are generally doing as well as they were before the pandemic.

What we need is not generic assistance, but assistance for those who actually need it. Primarily that means those who have lost their jobs, but it also means, for example, assistance specifically to the restaurant industry, which has been decimated by COVID-19. It also means states and cities, which are in dire shape thanks to plummeting tax revenue. That should be the top priority of any future coronavirus rescue package.

Sleepy or murderous? You make the call.

Mikhail Metzel/TASS via ZUMA

Emily Sohn writes about her recent trips to the dentist:

It was bad luck, I figured, or maybe just the reality of middle age. My dentist, Jennifer Herbert, suggested otherwise. Ever since the pandemic started, she says she has seen a surge in problems related to tooth-grinding and jaw-clenching. Perhaps, she suggested, pandemic stress was the culprit for my tooth woes, too. “It’s astronomical,” she says. “I’ve seen more patients with problems from grinding in the last few months than I have in the rest of my career.”

This is no joke. Six years ago, when my cancer diagnosis was brand new and I was undergoing my first round of chemotherapy followed by a stem cell transfer, Marian was beside herself with anxiety.¹ She didn’t know it at the time, but it turned out that as a result she was grinding her teeth at night. By the time it was all over a year later, she had undergone months of dental work and had five new crowns.

This is also an easily solved problem: your dentist can provide you with a custom-fitted mouthguard that you wear at night. If the COVID-19 pandemic and everything else going on has you worried enough to be grinding your teeth at night, get it looked at right away. There’s no need to wait until your teeth are half gone.

¹And me? I’m just not the worrying type, I guess. I snore, but I don’t grind my teeth.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 17. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Ever since China crushed its initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, the virus has been all but nonexistent throughout the entire country:

China is a country of 1.4 billion people spread over nearly 4 million square miles. Social distancing was relaxed in most places long ago, and even in Wuhan life returned to normal a month ago. Given this, it seems almost miraculous that China has managed to keep new cases under 50 per day and deaths at around one per day. Even their famously hardheaded approach to quarantines hardly seems like enough to explain it. I’d sure love to read a really good piece telling us how China has managed to accomplish this.

POSTSCRIPT: Vietnam and Taiwan also have very low case numbers, and their stories would be interesting too. However, neither of them ever had a big outbreak in the first place. China did.

Here’s a nice bright sunflower to take our minds off COVID-19 and apocalyptic wildfire skies.

Over at Politico, Tim Alberta takes the pulse of the very white, very leafy, very affluent suburb of Cedarburg, Wisconsin. It’s massively pro-Trump, of course, but when Alberta asks people why they like the guy he gets the same answer over and over: abortion. “The Democrats are so far to the left on abortion now that it’s impossible to vote for them,” says one resident. “I’m pretty close to a one-issue voter,” says another. “Abortion is the thing I care about most.” Half a dozen others followed suit.

Before you scoff at this as just the product of chance, check out the most recent Gallup poll on abortion as a voting issue:

Since Donald Trump was elected, the number of single-issue abortion voters has increased from 23 percent to 30 percent. Trump himself doesn’t talk much about abortion, but it’s an issue that’s driven a big change in voting behavior. With Brett Kavanaugh having taken the place of Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, there are now five pro-life justices instead of four-and-a-half. If Ruth Bader Ginsburg (age 87) or Stephen Breyer (age 82) retires or dies in the next four years, a Trump presidency would install a sixth pro-life judge on the court and almost guarantee that Roe v. Wade gets overturned.

Social conservatives can practically taste victory at this point, and they’re voting like it. Social liberals are . . . not quite so single-minded. This is probably an underappreciated factor in the 2020 election.

There is almost literally no good news these days. Oh, sure, the Lakers won their series against the Rockets a few days ago, and the Dodgers clinched a postseason berth yesterday. But in the real world, things look grim.

So here’s some genuinely good news for you that didn’t get an awful lot of play:

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 16. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Nerds everywhere rejoiced yesterday when the Census Bureau finally released its income numbers for 2019. I don’t want to keep you in suspense, so here are household income figures from 1980 through 2019:

As you might guess, 2019 was a very good year. Economic growth combined with sustained low unemployment forced a rise in incomes of 6.8 percent overall. That’s the biggest one-year increase since the Census Bureau began compiling records in 1980. Overall household income is now 11 percent higher than it was in 2007, before the start of the Great Recession.

The biggest gainers in 2019 were Asian households, up 10.6 percent, and Black households, up 7.9 percent. Latino households gained 7.1 percent and white households were up 5.9 percent.

Among individuals, men gained 4.6 percent and women gained 6.7 percent. Among full-time workers, women now make 82 percent as much as men:

The full report is here if you want to dig in further. The historical tables through 2019 are here.