It seems like every two years I read a story like this:

Richard Uihlein, a wealthy shipping-supplies magnate from Illinois who shuns the spotlight, has risen to become one of the most powerful — and disruptive — GOP donors in the country.

For years, Uihlein has given money to isolated races in the service of his anti-union, free-market and small-government views. But he has dramatically increased his giving this cycle, pouring $21 million into races from Montana to West Virginia to ensure more conservative victories in the upcoming midterm elections, Federal Election Commission records show.

Every election cycle there’s some new Republican billionaire who’s dumping bucketloads of money into races all over the country in service of his unique view that Republicans just aren’t conservative enough. Inevitably, this includes a deeply held belief that unions are a tool of Satan, despite the fact that unions apparently didn’t prevent them from becoming billionaires in the first place.

Anyway, Uihlein is the latest Fox News fan to decide that the Republican Party needs a shot of real conservatism and the RINOs need to be ridden out of town on a rail. Honestly, though, since this has been happening regularly for at least the past decade, I have a hard time calling this “disruptive.” It’s just business as usual.

What happened to the good old days, when robber barons were assholes during their business careers but then settled down to a life of philanthropy after their kids took over the business? Shouldn’t Uihlein be funding a children’s hospital or a nationwide chain of free internet cafes for inner-city kids or something?

Why have American men slowly but steadily stopped working? To refresh your memory, here’s the chart I put up yesterday:

This is for men aged 25-54, so retirement doesn’t play a part. It’s possible that increased use of disability payments does, but not a big one. Long story short, no one knows. It’s a matter of considerable dispute, and this is one reason that I think a federal jobs guarantee is a bad idea: if we don’t even know why the employment rate has been dropping for the past 50 years, we certainly don’t know if a jobs guarantee would turn it around.

So think bigger. There are some things we do know. For example, men’s wages, which increased nicely during the immediate postwar era, have stagnated since 1973. Despite four decades of strong US economic growth, the average American man today doesn’t earn a single dime more than the average man in 1973:

There are other ways you can calculate earnings, and some them show a slightly brighter picture. But not by much. At worst, men’s wages have stagnated, and at best they’ve grown sluggishly. This is important, but I’d argue that relative wages are even more important. Here are median household earnings compared to the top 5 percent:

The top 5 percent aren’t millionaires. They’re doctors and lawyers and accountants—and the average household has fallen steadily farther behind them for the past 40 years. This is all familiar stuff. Everyone knows that income inequality has increased over the past several decades, as the middle class has stagnated while the upper middle has kept doing better and the rich have done lots better. We’ve all seen the chart:

Now, this has happened all over the world, not just in the US. Income inequality in France and Germany are about the same as here. The difference is in how we tax it. You’d think that as their incomes skyrocketed, the average effective tax rates of the rich would go up too. Needless to say, you’d be wrong:

The result is that when you include both taxes and transfers (i.e., Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, etc.), income inequality in the US is considerably higher than it is in other rich countries:

None of these other countries have job guarantees. What they have is high taxes on the affluent, which are used to pay for things that help level out inequality: universal health care, universal child care, decent unemployment benefits, and so forth. This doesn’t make them nirvana, but neither does it wreck their economies. They’re mostly doing better than we are on the employment front:

So instead of a jobs guarantee, think about this instead: how can we best smooth out the huge increase in US income inequality, which leads to a quite reasonable feeling among the working class that they’re being left behind while elites hoover up all the money? The best answer would be reforms in the market economy that made income distribution fairer, but nobody really knows how to do that. That leaves us with the second-best answer: tax the rich and use the proceeds to give money and benefits to the not-rich.

But how much should we tax the rich? Here’s a chart that at least gives you a starting point to think about this:

Since 1980, per-capita GDP has grown 85 percent. If all that growth had been shared equally, median income would also have gone up 85 percent. It hasn’t, and we all know why: because most of the money has gone to the upper middle class and the rich. If we want something fairer, we need to increase taxes on the affluent by enough to raise about $15,000 for most working adults. I’ll let others do the arithmetic. In round numbers, call it a trillion dollars or two.

The obvious candidates for this money are universal health care and universal child care. The former goes a long way toward leveling the benefits of living in a rich country while the latter makes it far easier to hold a job. But what about something that directly tackles employment? My favorite idea is job subsidies.

This is an idea that’s popular among some conservatives, and I propose to take them up on it—on an industrial scale. There are lots of different versions floating around out there, but they all share some common elements. The basic idea is to leave the minimum wage alone and allow businesses to hire people for whatever the market says they’re worth. But then the feds top up the pay. Maybe everyone gets at least $15 per hour ($30,000 per year), with subsidies then declining between incomes of $30,000 and $60,000. Or something else. I’m not too worried about the details, only the scale. The basic impulse here is simple: earnings have stagnated over the past few decades—especially for men—and if we want more people working, the best way to attract them is to pay them more. It’s the easiest way of finding out who really wants to work and who doesn’t.

A jobs subsidy accomplishes several things. First, it doesn’t change the incentives of the market. Second, it makes jobs more lucrative, which should pull a lot more people into the labor market. And third, a jobs subsidy does what government does best: it writes checks, which ordinary people then spend on whatever they want. A jobs guarantee, by contrast, does what government does worst: it specifies exactly where the money will be spent; what it will be spent on; who will get it; and what the rules are for allocating it.

Bottom line: over the past few decades, the rich have taken all this money. Let’s take it back. In the same way that Republicans compete to offer the biggest tax cut plans during primaries, Democrats should be competing to offer the biggest tax increases on the rich. That will give us all a nice, quantitative measure of just how progressive each candidate really is. And as a bonus, this is already an extremely popular position even before anyone really makes a case for it:

Finally, on a completely different note, I’d add that this is good practice for our robot future, when we’re going to have to get used to redistributing income on a huge scale as people are steadily put out of work. Why not work out the kinks now?

The unemployment rate is currently 4.1 percent, a number so low that it’s been matched only one other time since 1970—and that was during the tail end of the dotcom bubble. But does that mean everyone who wants a job has one? It’s hard to say for sure. After all, there are people who have simply dropped out of the labor force and are no longer being counted. There are people working part-time who’d rather be working full-time. And there are people who stay at home voluntarily, but who might be enticed back into the labor force if they were offered enough money. So the unemployment rate doesn’t tell us conclusively if we’re really employing every single person that we could be.

But if the unemployment rate doesn’t tell us if we’re at full employment, what does? A popular alternative is the employment-population ratio, which just measures the number of people with jobs, full stop. It looks like this:

Th empop ratio increased steadily until about 2000, and then slumped. So this means we used to have a lot more people working than we do now. Right? Not necessarily. The baby boomers started retiring around 2000, and that reduced the empop ratio even though it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the labor market. And should the peak of the dotcom bubble be our yardstick anyway? When you take those things into account, maybe 60 percent is just fine.

Here’s a better way of looking at it: prime-age workers only; for men and women separately; by decade. First up, here are women:

Women entered the labor force in greater numbers starting in the 60s and their employment-population ratio rose. Then it peaked and flattened out. If you want, you can argue that more women should be working, but that’s more in the nature of a dogma than a clear fact. Roughly speaking, there’s nothing really wrong with this picture. Now, here are men:

This is the problem: the number of men in the labor force has dropped by eight percentage points since the 60s. But why? This didn’t start in the Reagan era. Nor did it start during the Great Recession. Prime-age men have been slowly but steadily leaving the labor force during nearly the entire postwar era—even during the 60s and early 70s, when the economy was booming.

This is one reason that I’m not excited about a federal jobs guarantee. There’s a very specific problem here, and solving it requires something that’s both more expansive and more focused than a jobs guarantee. It also needs to be something more likely to work. More on that later, after everyone has had time to mull this over.

Having now griped about the LA Times, here’s the story that kicked off today’s griping. It took a while, but I finally found it online:

The Trump administration is speeding toward all-out war with California over fuel economy rules for cars and SUVs, proposing to revoke the state’s long-standing authority to enforce its own, tough rules on tailpipe emissions…. Within the administration, officials have disagreed about how far and how quickly to push changes in fuel economy rules, according to officials familiar with the discussions. Some officials attuned to the concerns of the auto industry have warned against a proposal that over-reaches and could lead to years of litigation and uncertainty.

Wait. The auto industry is opposed to this because they want more certainty? How hard have they been lobbying the Trump administration to back off?

The auto industry began lobbying Trump to relax fuel economy standards soon after his election. But company officials have been clear that they want a deal with California, not a war with the state. In backroom negotiations, industry officials have urged the administration not to create a situation where California pursues one standard and the federal government pursues another.

Nice work, guys. Trump gets into office promising to raze everything President Obama ever did, so you jump on board. Then you’re dismayed when Trump is uninterested in half measures and instead wants to destroy the Obama fuel economy standards completely and, for good measure, take some revenge on California, his great white whale.

The American auto industry is bound and determined to always pursue the stupidest course of action available to them. They’ve been doing it for decades, all the while wondering why their cars aren’t more popular. This time, they could have finally done something smart. They could have loudly lobbied the Trump administration to leave the fuel economy standards alone. After all, they know perfectly well they can meet the tighter standards, and it would have been both good PR and a sign of confidence that they can compete with overseas manufacturers.

But no. As usual, they’re too dumb to go down that road. Doing something that’s both good for the planet and popular with the American public just never occurred to them.

Today is pet peeve day. Keep in mind that a pet peeve is something that (a) bugs me but (b) the rest of you don’t care about, and (c) I have to gripe about anyway. So here it is:

On the left is today’s print edition of the LA Times, which showed up on my driveway around 5 am. It has five stories. On the right is the online front page of the LA Times at about 10 am. It has nine stories, none of which are the ones in the print edition.¹

What’s the deal with this? It happens nearly every day. You’d think that if a story is important enough for the editors to put it on the front page of the print edition, it would be important enough to show up somewhere on the front page of the online edition a mere few hours later. But no.

Like I said, all of you are just shrugging about this and wondering what’s eating me. All I can say is that it sure makes it hard to link to stories I read in the print edition. They frequently aren’t anywhere on the front page, even if you scroll down forever. So then I try to figure out which section it might be in. Business? Local? Nation? Politics? Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. Frequently it turns out that the story ran two or three or even five days ago online. Then I try to search for it, but stories often don’t show up in a search, for reasons that baffle me.

In addition to fixing their search funtion and syncing up the print and online publishing dates, maybe they could at least include a “Today’s Front Page” box in the online edition? That wouldn’t be so hard, would it?

¹The “Golden State killer” story in the online edition is different from the one in the print edition. But if you want to count that one, that’s fine. They’re now 1 for 5 instead of 0 for 5.

Yesterday I posted a chart showing the (slight) decline in the US incarceration rate in 2016. However, a reader points out that the prison admission rate is more interesting as an indicator of what’s happening right now, and the decline there is more impressive. Here are admissions and releases over the past three decades:

Since its peak in 2006, new prison admissions have dropped by 19 percent. When admissions fall below releases, the total prison population shrinks—something that happened in 2009 for the first time since 1980 and has continued since then. Eventually, as some of the prisoners with long sentences doled out in the 80s and 90s come up for release at the same time that new admissions continue to decline, the incarceration rate should start dropping more steeply.

If we want the overall incarceration to come down even faster, the key is not just fewer admissions, but shorter sentences. US sentences tend to be far longer than those in the rest of the world, and now that crime rates have declined to the levels of 50 years ago we can probably afford to start handing out more reasonable sentences.

POSTSCRIPT: Note that this data is for prisoners only, not local jail inmates. The average jail sentence is only a few months, so admissions rates don’t have the same meaning as they do for prisons.

POSTSCRIPT 2: As with yesterday’s chart, I calculated these rates as a share of the non-elderly population, not the entire population. This means that the exact numbers are different from the ones you’ll see in other charts—though the basic shape isn’t much different. Why do I do this? Because if you use the entire population, some of the decline in the prison numbers is simply due to the growing number of those over 65, who account for about 0 percent of the prison population. I think it’s more useful to look at incarceration rates as a percentage of the population that’s actually responsible for nearly all crime and nearly all prisoners.

Here is Hilbert demonstrating how to take a proper nap. There will be a quiz later in the day.

The economy grew 2.3 percent in the first quarter:

There’s not a whole lot to say about this. Given our current demographics, 2.3 percent growth is fine. At the same time, it doesn’t suggest that the big Republican tax cut had much effect on consumer pocketbooks. This is hardly surprising since most of the tax cuts went to corporations—who are mostly using it for stock buybacks—and the rich—who are just tossing it into their investment accounts. The poor and middle class, who are more likely to spend a tax cut, got only a few dollars.

If I think that a federal jobs guarantee is a bad idea, then how should we reduce the ranks of the unemployed and make sure that everyone who wants a decent job can get one? Without diving too deeply into things, the answer is twofold:

• More jobs-friendly monetary and fiscal policy. That is, the Fed should generally be willing to run a hotter economy and the federal government should be more willing to spend money when it needs to.
• Specific programs. I’d expand the EITC. Maybe look at job subsidies. Raise the minimum wage. Strengthen the ability of unions to organize. Fund a big infrastructure program. Etc.

Over at Vox, Matt Yglesias broadly agrees with this. But here’s the twist:

Jobs guarantee proponents themselves are fond of citing the New Deal-era Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps programs as antecedents of their thinking, but these programs fell short of offering a universal employment guarantee. FDR rhetorically endorsed the goal of a right to a job in his second bill of rights, but specifically invoked “the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation” — i.e., the private sector — as central to that vision.

….A much wiser path is to follow Roosevelt’s actual model — the goal is a robust labor market, relief jobs are one of several tools to achieve it (and not necessarily the most important one), and it’s an enduring commitment, not a one-off policy shift.

….It polls well, and while some versions of the idea are unworkable or a hazy rhetorical smokescreen for total transformation of American society, others are perfectly sensible. Rather than argue about the phrase, people who agree that macroeconomic policy in the 21st century has been too complacent about the state of the labor market should pitch in and put our own better ideas into the mix.

I’ve had a post along these same lines rolling around in my head for a while, but I haven’t felt quite ready to write it. I’m still not. One of the big differences between Hillary and Bernie in the 2016 primaries was stylistic: Bernie got everyone excited with a promise of Medicare for All while Hillary, knowing that this had no chance of going anywhere, more cautiously proposed a steady improvement of Obamacare. Meanwhile, over on the Republican side, Donald Trump simply declared health care “so easy” and blithely promised to pass a bill that would provide great coverage for everyone without any need for higher taxes.

Trump won. So does that mean liberals should stop being so damn cautious and go down the same road? Should we campaign on a jobs guarantee for everyone, but skip the usual white papers and instead simply talk in generalities, with occasional excursions into bashing the Fed and supporting labor unions and so forth?

In other words, should we accept that rhetorical flourishes are no big deal in politics? Should we accept that most people don’t take the details of political proposals very seriously, and just want to know which side a politician is on? Or should we insist on staying more reality bound and not giving in to Trumpism?

I’ve been mulling this over for a while, and I’m still not sure. Consider this an open thread.

Keith Humphreys reminds us today that 2016 prison statistics are now available, and once again the total incarcerated population has declined. That’s good news, but it’s also a good opportunity to show you the long-term incarceration picture:

Between 1980 and 2000, the incarceration rate quadrupled before slowing down and finally peaking in 2008. The incarceration rate has declined 10 percent since then, and while that’s nothing to sneeze at, we have a very long way to go before we get back to anything resembling a sensible rate. We need to cut this in half, to a rate around 4 or 5. After all, our current crime rate is about what it was in the late 60s. There’s no reason our incarceration rate should be much higher.

UPDATE: The top chart originally had the wrong data. The shape was the same, but the numbers were systematically too high. Also it was originally labeled “Rate per 100,000 Non-Elderly Adults.” It’s actually the rate per 1,000.