Tag Archives: kevin drum

A Quick Look at Manufacturing Jobs

by JustinSilver Posted on May 10, 2017

Mother Jones

Donald Trump is bragging today that “Manufacturing openings, hires rise to highest levels of the recovery.” Well of course they have. As long the economy keeps expanding, openings will set a new record every month, more or less. Like so:

If you want to know how manufacturing is really doing, you want to look at it as a percentage of all job openings. Here you go:

Meh. Manufacturing job openings have been declining since 2012, but have shown a small uptick since the start of 2016. Nothing to get excited about, though.

I know, I know: who cares? Well, what can I tell you? I’m just trying to take my mind off the whole, incredible Comey thing. It’s mind boggling. Maybe today is a good day to start sniffing glue.

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A Quick Look at Manufacturing Jobs

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It’s Crunch Time for the Republican Party

by Curtis Tangredi Posted on May 10, 2017

Mother Jones

How the world works, 2017 edition:

July 2016: Republicans are united in outrage when James Comey declines to recommend charges against crooked Hillary Clinton despite mountains of evidence that she is totally guilty.

Today: Republicans are united in disappointment at Comey’s decision to harm poor Hillary Clinton by breaching agency guidelines against commenting on investigations and interfering with an upcoming election. Thank God he’s finally been fired.

The official story about Comey’s firing goes something like this. On April 25, Rod Rosenstein was confirmed as deputy attorney general. It takes him less than two weeks to put together a memo arguing that: Comey was wrong to usurp the attorney general’s prosecutorial authority. He was wrong to hold a “derogatory” press conference about Clinton. He was wrong three months later to claim that keeping quiet about the Huma Abedin emails amounted to “concealing” them. He shouldn’t have said anything on October 28. Rosenstein concludes by saying that everyone from the janitor to the pope agrees that this was obviously egregious behavior on Comey’s part. Within hours, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recommends Comey be fired and Trump immediately announces Comey’s termination. Comey hears about it on TV.

Needless to say, there is precisely nothing new in any of this. As Rosenstein says, these criticisms of Comey have been obvious from the start, and Trump could have used them as justification for firing Comey at any time. But he didn’t. Until now.

The difference between then and now, of course, is that then Comey was helping bury Hillary Clinton, and now Comey is investigating ties between Russia and Trump. So only now is it time for Comey to go.

So far, there are a tiny handful of Republicans who are “troubled” by Comey’s firing. Will they go any farther? Will any more Republicans join them? Or is everyone going to take one for the team and pretend that Comey really was fired because of how badly he treated Hillary Clinton?

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It’s Crunch Time for the Republican Party

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Donald Trump’s 18-Day Gap

by AbrahamCathey Posted on May 9, 2017

Mother Jones

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We didn’t really learn anything new in today’s congressional hearing, but the questioning did highlight one of the ugliest aspects of the Flynn affair. Sally Yates testified that she informed White House counsel on January 26 that Mike Flynn had lied about his contacts with the Russians and that he was vulnerable to blackmail by the Russians. “To state the obvious,” Yates said, “you don’t want your national security adviser compromised with the Russians.”

For 18 days, President Trump didn’t do anything. Nor did he give any sign that he ever planned to do anything. It was only after Flynn’s actions became public, via a leak to the Washington Post, that Trump finally fired him.

He’s never explained why he didn’t fire Flynn immediately. Richard Nixon had his 18-minute gap, and now Trump has an 18-day gap. Instead of grousing endlessly about the leak, Trump should tell us if he would have kept a security risk like Flynn in his inner circle forever if the leak had never happened.

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Donald Trump’s 18-Day Gap

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Are Younger Police Officers More Productive Than Older Ones?

by BrianneDetwiler Posted on May 8, 2017

Mother Jones

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Tyler Cowen points us to a study from last year which concludes that police officers become “less productive” as they gain experience. Here’s the abstract:

This study analyzes two decades of data from a municipal police agency and describes the average patrol officer career productivity trajectory. We find that declines in productivity begin immediately after the first year of service and worsen over the course of officers’ careers. After their 20th year, patrol officers generate 88% fewer directed patrols, 50% fewer traffic warnings, 58% fewer traffic citations, 41% fewer warrant arrests, and 57% fewer misdemeanor arrests compared to officers with 1 year of experience. Using a patrol officer productivity metric called Z-score per Productive Time (Z-PRO), we estimate that each additional year of service decreases an officer’s overall productivity by about 2%. Z-PRO also indicates that after 21 years of service, an average officer will be approximately 35% less productive overall than an officer with 1 year of service.

There’s an issue of framing here: What is the “proper” level of productivity for a police officer? Perhaps the real issue is that newish police officers are overzealous. They’re eager to ticket anyone going 6 miles over the speed limit. They arrest anyone hanging out on a corner who turns out to have a joint in their pocket. Etc.

It’s not necessarily the case that more is always better. To really judge this stuff, you’d also need to measure the quality of arrests and traffic citations in some way. It’s possible that older officers arrest less because their experience tells them it’s better to let the small stuff go, but have a better eye for genuinely dangerous behavior.

Then again, maybe they just get lazy.

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Are Younger Police Officers More Productive Than Older Ones?

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Why Do Republicans Tell Such Obvious Lies?

by Silvester Mongan Posted on May 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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These tweets from Paul Ryan’s press secretary kind of crack me up:

This is a pretty crude evasion, and a seemingly pointless one. Anybody who’s savvy enough to know what a CBO score is in the first place also knows that this is badly misleading. Earlier bills were scored. Earlier bills went through committee. Earlier bills were posted online a month ago. But none of that applies to the actual bill that was passed on Thursday.

So why bother? Donald Trump has taught Republicans that Twitter is a useful tool for communicating with your base, and that’s all this is. Most people who read these tweets will have no idea what they’re about, just that they’re more examples of how the lying left is always telling lies about Republicans. It will become a useful attack meme on the right for a while, and that’s all it’s for.

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Why Do Republicans Tell Such Obvious Lies?

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Trump: Everyone Has a Better Health Care System Than Us

by Aliza69Hlovhvip Posted on May 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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Here is Donald Trump defending his offhand statement that Australia has better health care than America:

Needless to say, Trump doesn’t have a clue about what kind of health care Australia provides or whether it’s better than ours. He’s just whistling in the wind, like he always does.

The interesting thing about this is that shows yet again how little Trump knows about conservative ideology—and how little he cares about it. For years, conservatives have insisted that America has the best health care in the world. Just look at all those Canadians crossing the border for hip replacements! And the reason for our superiority is that we rely on the free market far more than most countries.

Trump just casually batted that away. Australia has a fairly common system cobbled together over the years, with taxes paying for basic universal health care and private insurance companies picking up the slack (sort of like Medigap insurance in the US for Medicare patients). It’s not especially generous, but it’s also about half the cost of American health care.

And Trump just said it’s better than the health care we get. Ditto for Britain’s fully socialized health care. Ditto for the Scandinavian countries. Ditto for France and Germany and Japan. Everyone with a government-funded universal health care system is better than us.

Normally, a statement like this would produce a huge blowback among conservatives. But not this time. That’s because conservatives all know that Trump has no idea what he’s saying, and no plans to let it guide policy. He’s certainly not planning to adopt the Australian model. Just the opposite: it’s little more than random babbling while he happily allows Congress to kill off the most Australian-ish aspects of American health care.

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Trump: Everyone Has a Better Health Care System Than Us

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Friday Cat Blogging – 5 May 2017

by MaynardSaywell Posted on May 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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Today’s homage to Donald Trump is part of my relentless quest to bring my readers the finest possible blogging experience. Here’s how far I’m willing to go: yesterday I drove out to one of Irvine’s leading fast food emporiums and bought a taco bowl. $5.79! I brought it home, got out my camera, and introduced it to the cats. It was so disgusting they immediately ran away and wouldn’t come back. Eventually it fell apart.

So then I went to one of Irvine’s leading supermarkets and bought a box of tostada shells. $4.99! I filled one up with cat food and then added a dollop of sour cream for that authentic south-of-the-border flavor. Hilbert still wasn’t having any. Luckily, Hopper was intrigued by the sour cream. She jumped up and started licking it, and thanks to the burst mode on my camera I got 40 or 50 shots of this. Within minutes my homage was finished. Enjoy!

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Friday Cat Blogging – 5 May 2017

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Health Care Vote Likely to Happen on Thursday

by JocelynBraden1 Posted on May 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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It’s been literally hours since I last updated you on the Republican health care bill, so let’s catch up. Twitter is our friend:

What’s the rush?

Roger that. TrumpCare 1.0 arguably failed because of that hideous CBO score saying that 24 million people would lose coverage—a truly remarkable achievement since Obamacare only covers 20 million people in the first place. TrumpCare 3.0 is even worse, so God only knows what the CBO would say about it. Anyway, how bad can it be? I mean really?

Urk. Pretty bad. Even the AMA gets it:

Good for them. What’s remarkable, though, is how lonely their position is:

I don’t really get this either. Maybe they’ve just given up? Maybe they figure that as part of the hated establishment, their opposition is just more likely to make Republicans vote yes? Beats me.

This bill needs to be decisively put out of its misery. Yes, I suppose Democrats might benefit by forcing vulnerable House members to vote for it, and then killing it in the Senate, but that’s not worth the risk that, somehow, it might actually pass if it gets through the House. You never know. Best to make it crystal clear that there’s simply no needle Republicans can thread on this subject.

Then we get to wait and see if President Trump kills Obamacare anyway in a fit of pique by cutting off the CSR subsidies. This is really shaping up to be a great year.

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Health Care Vote Likely to Happen on Thursday

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The Conservative Beef With ESPN Is All About Curt Schilling

by DelilaATPK Posted on May 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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ESPN has been losing viewers for a while now, and there are various theories to account for it. Maybe millennials just aren’t into sports that much. Or maybe cord cutting of all types is the culprit. Or maybe ESPN has gotten too liberal.

That last one is a favorite among conservatives, and I don’t really get it. I’m not a heavy ESPN viewer, but I watch enough to have some sense of its political leanings. And I haven’t really discerned much. Mostly they seem to call games and then argue about whether Tom Brady can play football into his fifties. You know, sports stuff.

But today, Paul Hiebert at the polling firm YouGov presents this chart:

First off, I’m impressed that YouGov has been polling this question since 2013. I wonder why?

In any case, this chart suggests that the problem isn’t liberalism in general, but the fact that ESPN fired Curt Schilling. The Caitlyn Jenner thing hurt for a few months, but by April of 2016 all was forgiven and Republican support of ESPN was back to normal. It was the Curt Schilling affair that killed them. Just to refresh your memory, here’s the Facebook meme he shared that was the final straw:

This was after Schilling “shared a meme that compared extremism in today’s Muslim world to Nazi Germany in 1940 and told a radio station that Hillary Clinton ‘should be buried under a jail somewhere,’ in apparent violation of an ESPN policy on commentary relating to the presidential election.”

So politics is part of the answer after all. But not a slide into liberal politics. Conservatives were mad because Schilling engaged in venomous conservative politics, and eventually ESPN fired him before he did something that could get them sued. Conservatives are always the victims, aren’t they?

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The Conservative Beef With ESPN Is All About Curt Schilling

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Auto Sales Slumped Badly in April

by StephenSolar Posted on May 2, 2017

Mother Jones

Auto and light truck sales went from lackluster to downright bad in April:

The Wall Street Journal provides additional reasons to worry:

Another troubling sign: It is taking dealers far longer to sell off inventory, resulting in a glut of unsold cars and trucks. GM, the No. 1 U.S. auto maker, has nearly 1 million vehicles of unsold units on dealer lots….Fred Rentschler, a dealer in Slatington, Pa., said his family’s Chevrolet store has 120 models on the lot and another 50 being delivered, nearly 20% more than the same time last year. “They’re coming through with inventory,” he said. “We’re just not selling them as quickly.”

Also: discounts are high and interest rates are low. But that’s still not enough to get customers onto the lot. This is a modest downturn at the moment, but it’s yet another sign that something seems to be out of whack between what people say (consumer confidence is high) and what people are doing (retail sales are sluggish).

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Auto Sales Slumped Badly in April

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