Evan Soltas is concerned about the graying of Congress:

The average age of the U.S. Congress has risen by almost 10 years since 1980, an increase of historic magnitude. More data analysis of Voteview bios (https://t.co/kZzRgEjkra). pic.twitter.com/I353uIK7nK

— Evan Soltas (@esoltas) April 26, 2018

Looking at these charts, I got curious about something. The age of Congress increases steadily from the beginning, just as you’d expect given lengthening lifespans. But then there’s a sudden drop in age from about 1958 through 1980. So what would Congress look like if there had been no decline and average age had continued to go up as it had for the previous 170 years? Like this:

We’re right where we ought to be. Life expectancy at age 30 has gone up about 15 years since 1789, and the average age of Congress has also gone up 15 years. So there’s no mystery there. The real question is, why was there a sudden drop over the 20-year period from 1958-1980? Perhaps something related to the World War II generation getting old enough to run for Congress? Followed up later by the post-Watergate congressional classes? Anybody got any other ideas?

Technically, my sister only gets to curate one of this week’s photos, but she did sort of hint that she thought an adorable little bunny would also be nice this week. So here you go. I don’t quite know where rabbits go in the winter, but in the spring they all seem to pop up out of nowhere again. Here’s the 2018 edition of rabbit rabbitus.

Dodger Stadium is one mile from Union Station in downtown LA. But that’s a mile as the crow flies. In real life, it’s a very long and very slow mile.

The solution, apparently, is to get there the same way crows do: fly. The Dodgers are proposing an aerial gondola that would start in Union Station, climb high over Chinatown and the Harbor Freeway, and then dock itself in the parking lot at the stadium. The cost is a mere $125 million and it would allegedly be funded entirely privately. The fare would be “less than” $20.

I am totally into this. But I have a suggestion: how about a competition? We could pit the gondola people against Elon Musk’s boring company. Which one could build a one-mile, point-to-point transit system for the least amount of money?

Do cap-and-trade systems work? The first one certainly worked to reduce acid rain. But what about carbon emissions? The biggest and most ambitious carbon trading system in the world is Europe’s ETS, which has been widely viewed as a failure because the price of its carbon allowances was so low for so long. If the cap on carbon is so loose that it hardly costs anything to buy carbon allowances, you’re not reducing emissions much, are you?

A big part of the problem with ETS was bad luck: by the time it really got rolling, the world had fallen into a deep recession that would last for years. As a result, starting around 2010 demand dropped for just about everything in Europe, and along with that so did carbon emissions. For a long time, ETS wasn’t really needed because the recession was keeping emissions low all by itself. But now the world economy is recovering and emissions are going up:

Emissions regulated under Europe’s carbon market rose for the first time in seven years in 2017 due to stronger industrial output, data published on Tuesday by the European Commission and examined by carbon analysts at Thomson Reuters showed.

….According to the analysts’ interpretation of the data, emissions totalled 1.756 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) last year for companies under the ETS excluding airlines, up 0.3 percent on the previous year.

And guess what? With emissions rising, so is the price of ETS carbon allowances:

One of the virtues of any emissions system is predictability: companies prefer to deal with fairly steady requirements, rather than being buffeted by big swings in how much they’re allowed to emit or how much they have to pay for it. This is the Achilles’ heel of cap-and-trade: it can produce big swings in allowance pricing, as we’re seeing now. But every system for limiting greenhouse gas emissions—whether market-based or purely regulatory—has weaknesses. Generally speaking, a well-designed cap-and-trade system regulates exactly what we want to regulate: emission levels. And it does it efficiently by allowing companies to trade allowances, which ensures that the least important emissions are the first ones cut.

And it’s going to get better: next year the EU’s Market Stability Reserve goes into effect, and this will cut back on emissions even further. ETS isn’t perfect, but its history shows what can happen when a government is dedicated to reducing greenhouse gases and just keeps plodding along. Eventually things start to work pretty well.

Stormy Daniels: Clinton Wallace/Globe Photos/ZUMA; Michael Cohen: Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

Even doing softball interviews on Fox & Friends, Donald Trump can’t manage to keep his stories straight. First, he straight-up admitted that he had been lying when he said he knew nothing about Michael Cohen’s hush money payment to Stormy Daniels:

“Michael represents me, like with this crazy Stormy Daniels deal, he represented me,” Trump said. “And from what I’ve seen, he did absolutely nothing wrong. There were no campaign funds going into this.”

Then, despite the fact that the FBI’s recent seizure of Cohen’s records was directly related to Stormygate, he went back to his old story that he knew nothing, nothing:

Trump went on to attempt to distance himself from Cohen, in keeping with the president’s tendency to claim he has little to do with associates once they get into trouble….“This doesn’t have to do with me,” Trump said. “Michael is a businessman. He’s got a business. He also practices law. I would say, probably, the big thing is his business. I have nothing to do with his business.”

If the FBI finds evidence related to the payment to Daniels, it might very well have to do with Trump. But at least the president is keeping his chin up.

Does access to legal marijuana reduce opioid abuse? It’s a tricky question to answer, but Mark Kleiman points today to a recent Rand report that tests the effect of medical marijuana laws between 1999-2013 on both opioid deaths and treatment for opioid addiction.

The study finds that medical marijuana laws appear to have almost no effect on opioid use. What’s important, it turns out, is the existence of legally-protected dispensaries. Once those are in operation, the authors estimate that within a few years admission to addiction treatment programs declines 38 percent and opioid deaths decline 25 percent:

It’s worth noting a couple of things. First, these numbers tend to vary a fair amount depending on precisely which years are included in the study and which controls are used. Second, the total distribution of legal opioid painkillers doesn’t decline after legal marijuana dispensaries become active. Taken together, this means that (a) the findings aren’t especially robust, (b) the paper is unable to say why opioid abuse seems to decline after legal dispensaries are opened, and (c) the sample sizes are fairly modest—something that’s inevitable since we’re still in the early days of legal pot dispensaries.

Those are all good reasons not to treat these results as gospel. FWIW, I’d add another: the results seem too large. It makes sense that opioid abuse might decline when a different kind of pain therapy becomes widely available, but it’s a little hard to believe that the effect would be this large within just a few years. For more reasons to be cautious about these results, Kleiman has you covered in his post. However, we both agree that if we had to bet, we’d now bet that legalizing marijuana probably helps to cut down on opioid abuse. The effect might not be as large as this study suggests, but it’s probably greater than zero.

How are things going down on the Southwest border? Not so good according to the Border Patrol: “During the month of March CBP saw a 37 percent increase overall when compared to February, but a 203 percent increase compared to March 2017.”

Yikes! An increase in apprehensions usually means that more people are trying to cross the border, so this represents a big jump in illegal immigration. But how are things really going? Illegal immigration is seasonal, so let’s take a look at border apprehensions just in winter so we’re comparing apples to apples:

Even if you use the average for all of winter, apprehensions are up 50 percent compared to last year. However, seasonality isn’t what it used to be. Over the past few years illegal border crossings have been only mildly seasonal, so it might be more helpful to zoom in on all monthly totals for the past few years:

A moderate drop in January followed by a rebound in February isn’t unusual, but in 2017 we got an enormous drop from January all the way through April, bringing border apprehension levels to historic lows. This is something I thought might happen: there are a few areas where pure bluster can accomplish something, and this is one of them. After Trump was elected, it’s quite possible that his loud talk, followed up by some showy raids after he took office, scared a lot of potential border crossers away:

This is a case where fear works. But will it work for long? The problem with amping up the bluster is that eventually it becomes the new normal and no longer has much effect. By that time, you really need to have an effective policy in place, and it’s not yet clear if Trump has the attention span or political skills to make that happen. We’ll see.

To give him his due, I’d say that Trump’s attention span has been fine on this issue. He keeps hammering away at it. But he hasn’t been very effective at putting together actual policies to keep illegal immigration levels low, even though Democrats have offered him some pretty good deals. But that’s our negotiator-in-chief for you. He’s spent 30 years screwing up every deal he got his hands on, and now he has an even bigger canvas to screw up on.

Paul Morse/Office of George W. Bush

Paul Morse explains how he got that viral picture of all the presidents and first ladies:

It all kind of naturally came together. All of the characters were there except President Clinton, who was talking to someone. He was the last one who joined the picture and he kind of scooted in there, which is why he’s partially obscured by Mrs. Clinton.

Of course he was. Never change, Bill.

My sister was over for pizza last night, so the management of Lunchtime Photo asked her to curate today’s selection. She chose this picture of Lower Yosemite Fall.

Perusing my LA Times this morning, Michael Hiltzik brings me up to speed on the latest GOP plan for paid family leave:

The idea of government-sponsored paid family leave is gaining popularity at the state level and in Washington, where Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ivanka Trump are “strategizing” to bring more Republicans into the fold….It’s a good idea that would finally bring the United States into line with every other high-income nation on Earth, as a recent analysis by the Urban Institute points out. But the Urban Institute also observes that the Rubio-Trump idea for financing the program through Social Security is a terrible idea.

Wait. Social Security? What does that have to do with paid family leave? Here’s a previous Hiltzik column on the genesis of this proposal from Kristin Shapiro and Andrew Biggs:

Shapiro and Biggs propose offering mothers and fathers the equivalent of Social Security disability for up to 12 weeks of leave….But unlike traditional Social Security disability coverage, the recipients would be required to pay the money back by delaying their Social Security retirement benefits.

Details aside, let’s call this what it is: a loan. The Trubio plan basically offers new parents a 12-week loan that they have to pay back later. So why bring Social Security into this at all? Why not just handle it like student loans, with new parents getting a bank loan guaranteed by the federal government and repayment delayed for, say, ten years? Banks would love the guaranteed profits. It’s true that parental leave loans would be less lucrative than student loans since they’re only for 12 weeks, but maybe payday lenders could get into the act. That would make it a twofer for Republicans.

It would also make it clear to recipients what they’re getting themselves into. “Delayed retirement” 40 years in the future seems pretty fuzzy to most people. A loan that has to be paid back in a decade is a lot more concrete. And at least it would be cheaper than the Trubio version. The Urban Institute, using their fabulous DYNASIM model, recently calculated an estimate of benefits vs. repayments for the Trubio plan, and it looked like this:

On the bright side, the Trubio plan turns out to be fairly progressive since it inherits the progressiveness of Social Security payments and benefits. On the not-so-bright side, everyone with kids has a big loan to be paid off when they retire. This does not strike me as an especially family-friendly policy.