My mother’s cat Ditto passed away a couple of weeks ago after a long illness. (Her orange cat, Tillamook, is fine.) So earlier this week she headed out to get a pair of new kittens who were being fostered by a friend. They are still kind of shy, but came out long enough yesterday for a bit of catblogging. The tabby is named Lilly, and she is very photogenic indeed. The tuxedo cat is Luna, so the whole gang is Tilly, Lilly, and Luna. Welcome them to the family!

Hmmm:

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and other Republican leaders in Congress on Friday urged President Trump not to terminate an Obama-era program that has allowed nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants to live and work in the country without fear of deportation.

Ryan said in a radio interview that it was up to Congress to determine the fate of the immigrants enrolled in Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which offers two-year work permits to those who have been in the country illegally since they were children, a group known as “dreamers.” Asked if Trump should follow through on campaign pledges to end DACA, Ryan told WCLO in his hometown of Janesville, Wis.: “I actually don’t think he should do that. I believe that this is something that Congress has to fix.”

In one sense, it’s good to hear Ryan say this. At the same time, I wonder if this is exactly the kind of statement that will provoke Trump into killing DACA because, dammit, nobody tells Donald Trump what to do.

It’s hard to know these days. There’s really no such thing as unalloyed good news anymore, is there?

From the Washington Post:

“Build that wall,” Trump said at the Aug. 22 rally in Phoenix. “Now the obstructionist Democrats would like us not to do it. But believe me, if we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall.”

But shortly after Trump made those comments, White House officials quietly notified Congress that the $1.6 billion would not need to be in a “continuing resolution” that was meant to fund government operations from October until sometime in early December, a senior GOP congressional aide said.

Loudly: BUILD THE WALL! Quietly: You can skip the wall.

Trump’s base doesn’t read the Post, so I guess this doesn’t matter. They’ll be content with pretty pictures of prototypes for a while, I suppose. Still, I wonder how long it will take until they realize how badly they’ve been conned. Breitbart cares about the wall, doesn’t it?

Gary Cohn is eager to be part of the upcoming tax cut team:

Gary Cohn gives quite a non-answer when asked if he is only staying at the White House to get tax reform done (on Fox Business): pic.twitter.com/u9HzWTtxkP

— David Wright (@DavidWright_CNN) September 1, 2017

Poor Cohn. He’s getting flak for claiming there’s been no tax cut for 31 years. What he obviously meant to say was that the last big corporate tax reform was 31 years ago, which is true. The problem is that it’s not clear that either Cohn or Congress is really working on a big corporate tax reform right now. As Cohn says, they’re working on a tax cut. The tax reform of 1986 did cut the tax rate, but it also widened the base and was basically revenue-neutral.

So how long has it been since a big corporate tax cut? Pretty much forever. There’s never been one. Various small changes over time, combined with corporations getting more efficient at tax avoidance, have reduced effective tax rates, but that’s it. So Cohn really has a chance to make history. If he oversees a big corporate tax cut that’s not revenue neutral, he’ll be the first person in history to do it. That’s surely something a man can be proud of. After all, lower corporate tax rates are a surefire way to boost economic growth. Right?

The American economy added 156,000 new jobs last month, 90,000 of which were needed to keep up with population growth. This means that net job growth clocked in at 66,000 jobs. That’s pretty anemic, but August usually tends to be sort of an anemic month for job growth. The headline unemployment rate ticked back up slightly to 4.4 percent, all of it for bad reasons: the number of employed people declined and the number of unemployed people increased. But there was good news for some: the unemployment rate for high school dropout plummeted from 6.9 percent to 6.0 percent.

Hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees went up at an annual rate of 2.3 percent. Considering that inflation has been running around 0 percent all year, that’s not too bad.

Here’s the latest news from Trumpland:

Last year, the officials said, the Obama administration spent about $100 million on educating Americans about their health insurance choices and urging them to enroll. This year, HHS will spend just $10 million. Additionally, HHS will nearly cut in half the funding for hundreds of navigator groups across the country who provide in-person assistance to people signing up for health insurance, making the grants conditional on how many people each group signed up last year.

Why? Because fuck you, that’s why. After all, having spent the entire year confusing the hell out of everyone about what’s going on, there’s really no need for any kind of advertising or outreach, is there? “People are generally aware of Obamacare and the exchanges,” said an HHS flack who obviously couldn’t care less if anyone on the planet is aware of Obamacare. “They are aware of the products out there and aware they can sign up.”

Of course, what most people are “aware” of is that the deadline for signups comes in January. It’s always been in January. But Trump has changed that to December because—well, same reason as before. And now he’s cut off the program that might warn people they’d better sign up a month earlier than they’re used to.

But maybe the Trump administration has some better use for this money lined up. Right? Oddly, HHS didn’t mention that. I’m sure it was just an oversight.

I wonder: do these guys think anyone actually believes them? Or do they just not care?

Here’s one of our local rabbits. Or is it a hare? Perhaps a white-tailed jackrabbit, which is actually a species of hare? Help me out, hive mind!

Over at Wonkblog, Heather Long writes:

Forget the soaring stock market. Here’s the real evidence the U.S. economy is getting better: Food stamp usage is down, and spending on entertainment — everything from Netflix to Disney World trips — is up. The average American household now spends more than $2,900 a year, a record high, on entertainment, according to data released Tuesday by the Labor Department. That’s a good sign the middle class is feeling better about how much money is in their piggy banks.

The chart below is sort of an accident because I initially went to the wrong place for the data, but here is spending since 1984 for “entertainment” as defined by the BLS and for the broader category of “recreation” as defined by the BEA:

Spending on recreation dropped for only two years during the Great Recession. Then it flattened, and it’s been rising steadily for five consecutive years. Spending on entertainment, however, dropped for five years, and has only been rising for the past three years. It has yet to return to its 2008 peak.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this. One thing, of course, is that if this is your metric for “real evidence” that the economy is getting better, then it’s been getting better for at least three years, and maybe for five. The other is that recreation rebounded sooner and stronger than entertainment. Why is this?

• Recreation includes recreational vehicles. I’m not sure how that’s defined, but it’s a fair guess that not every recreational vehicle is truly used for recreation all the time.
• Lots of entertainment these days is cheap (video games) or free (spending time on social media). This makes traditional entertainment like movies and concerts a tougher sell. However, it also means that this metric is not necessarily a good way to judge the economy.
• Spending on recreation has gone up 120 percent since 1984 while spending on entertainment has gone up only 36 percent. Entertainment is just a slower-growing category.

My best guess: Recreation is a better category to use, and it’s been on the rise since it bottomed out in 2011. There’s not much real news in the latest numbers.

Matt Yglesias has unkind words today for Paul Ryan’s alleged “tax return on a postcard.” As he notes, we pretty much already have this in the Form 1040EZ, which would fit on a postcard if it weren’t for added fluff like room for your name and address and spaces for you to sign at the bottom. If anything, though, I think Yglesias is too kind. Here is my annotated version of Ryan’s postcard:

In other words, cut the crap. If you have simple wage income and take the standard deduction, your taxes are already postcard simple. For anyone else, the tricky part is calculating your income based on the rules passed by Congress and enforced by the IRS. Ryan’s postcard does nothing to change that, which means that in real life your postcard will be accompanied by dozens or hundreds of pages of additional worksheets, schedules, and references.

But who cares, right? Honesty is for suckers these days.

Johann Groder/APA Picturedesk via ZUMA

Progress:

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved the first-ever treatment that genetically alters a patient’s own cells to fight cancer, a milestone that is expected to transform treatment in the coming years….The therapy, marketed as Kymriah and made by Novartis, was approved for children and young adults for an aggressive type of leukemia — B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia….The treatment was originally developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and licensed to Novartis. It was identified in previous reports as CAR-T cell therapy, CTL019 or tisagenlecleucel.

Hooray! Let’s do multiple myeloma next! This therapy costs half a million bucks or so, but as long as someone else is paying for it I figure I’m worth it.