Tag Archives: motherjones-com

Chart of the Day: How Austerity Wrecked the Recovery

by BobbyLomas Posted on August 4, 2014

Mother Jones

I’ve previously nominated a version of the illustration below as chart of the year, and last year I wrote an entire piece for the print magazine as basically just an excuse to get it in print. Bill McBride’s version focuses on public sector payroll, not total public sector spending, but it tells the same story: after every previous recession of the past 40 years, the subsequent recovery was helped along by increased government outlays. In the 2007-08 recession—and only in this recession—the recovery was deliberately hobbled by insisting on declining government outlays. This is despite the fact that it was the worst recession of the bunch.

The result, of course, was that there was no Obama Miracle in 2011. In fact, there was barely even an Obama Recovery. If you think that’s just a coincidence, I have a bridge to sell you.

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Chart of the Day: How Austerity Wrecked the Recovery

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Wage Stagnation Is No Illusion

by CeliaZeller Posted on July 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Bloomberg has a long article today wondering whether wage stagnation is mainly due to demographic shifts:

25- to 34-year-olds will make up 22.5 percent of the workforce by 2022, compared with 21.6 percent in 2012….Meanwhile, the share of 45- to 54-year-olds in their best earning years will drop by 3.3 percentage points in the decade ending 2022.

….Hollowing out the middle-aged working population could cut median earnings because such employees bring home the biggest paychecks. The median 45- to 54-year-old household earns $66,400 a year, compared with $51,400 for 25- to 34-year-old households.

Well, sure. Compared to 30 years ago, the theory goes, we have more young workers bringing down the average and fewer prime age workers raising the average. As a result, the average is declining. But all that means is that baby boomers are aging out of the workforce, not that wages are necessarily in bad shape.

That makes sense. At least, it would make sense if it were true. The thing is, in an article more than a thousand words long, we never learn that we can look at this directly. The chart on the right shows the median wages of just 25-34 year olds, and as you can see, they’ve been declining for more than a decade. This has nothing to do with demographics because it’s measuring wages for the same age group the entire time.

Now, these figures don’t include health insurance, and they only go through 2012. So they aren’t of much help if, say, the Fed is trying to gauge the tightness of the labor market in the second quarter of 2014. Nonetheless, they certainly show a long-term trend of wage stagnation that plainly has nothing to do with demographics. This makes it vanishingly unlikely that wage stagnation over the past six months is merely due to demographic shifts.

It’s a nice fairy tale to pretend that wage stagnation might just be an artifact of boomers retiring, but easily available data quite clearly shows otherwise. It’s real.

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Wage Stagnation Is No Illusion

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Republicans Love Obamacare!

by LorrieWolford Posted on July 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s an additional tidbit from that recent Commonwealth Fund survey about Obamacare:

That’s a lot of Republicans who are satisfied with their Obamacare coverage. They might not realize it’s Obamacare—perhaps they know it as Kynect or Covered California—but they like it. And if you take it away, they’re going to be unhappy. That’s several million potentially unhappy Republicans if the national GOP continues its anti-Obamacare jihad. Just saying.

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Republicans Love Obamacare!

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Friday Cat Blogging – 4 July 2014

by SusannaGriffie Posted on July 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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I think it’s time to stop pretending there’s going to be anything to blog about this morning, and just get straight to catblogging. I was hoping for something patriotically themed, but that was a no-go. Domino is just not a dress-up kind of cat. So then I thought I’d get her to lounge in front of all the various goodies for tonight’s picnic. She wasn’t having any of that either. The best I could do was this tableau, which lasted about a second or two before Domino scampered away as if the Peeps were going to leap up and attack her. It’s just hard to get her in the proper spirit.

For the rest of you, though, have a lovely 238th birthday party.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 4 July 2014

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The US Economy Imploded Last Quarter

by GeoffrePutilin Posted on June 25, 2014

Mother Jones

Yikes. In the first quarter GDP didn’t grow by an anemic 0.1 percent. Nor did it shrink by 1 percent. According to the Commerce Department’s final tally, it shrunk by 2.9 percent.

Everyone is brushing this off because other economic signals suggest it was a one-off event. And maybe so. But even if it is, it probably knocks about 1 percent off the full-year figure compared to a more normal growth rate of, say, at least 2 percent. The only way it turns out to be a nothingburger is if this number really is an anomaly and the economy makes up for it with supercharged growth for the rest of the year.

I have my doubts about that. I just don’t buy the tired excuse that the Q1 number was weather related. Something happened.

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The US Economy Imploded Last Quarter

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Lead and Crime: Schoolyard Fighting Edition

by BrittAfford Posted on June 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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If lead exposure in childhood produces more aggressive behavior later in life, you’d expect lead exposure to be highly correlated with later rates of violent crime. And it is. But you’d also expect to see increases in violent behavior all along the spectrum. Not just rapes and murders, but ordinary bar fights and punching out kids in school hallways. Unfortunately there’s not much data on this stuff. Unless it rises to the level of cops being called and charges being filed, bar fights just aren’t tabulated anywhere.

But it turns out that schoolyard fights are. And guess what? They’ve been steadily decreasing ever since 1993, just as you’d expect. It’s too bad we don’t have earlier data, so we could see if high-school fighting rose in the 60s and 70s, but this is still an interesting data point that supports the lead theory. It’s not just the most violent crime that’s declined over the past two decades, it’s also the more prosaic types of less intense violence.

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Lead and Crime: Schoolyard Fighting Edition

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Can You Guess When Violent Crime in Our Schools Peaked?

by Burt Bollman Posted on June 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Tim Lee, here’s a pretty interesting chart from a newly released report on crime in schools. It shows the rate of violent crime committed on campus: rape, robbery, assault, and sexual assault.1 And it sure looks pretty familiar, doesn’t it? It peaks in 1993, about 18 years after leaded gasoline started being phased out in 1975, then turned down and continued declining for the next 20 years.

Since the oldest students in our schools are 18 years old, the crime rate should start to flatten out approximately 18 years after the final elimination of leaded gasoline in 1995. That would be 2013. And so far, it looks like that’s about what’s happening.

All the usual caveats apply. This isn’t proof, it’s just a data point. But it’s a pretty compelling data point, isn’t it?

1Homicide isn’t included, but the homicide rate in schools is so low that it doesn’t affect these figures noticeably.

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Can You Guess When Violent Crime in Our Schools Peaked?

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Here Are the Origins of Benghazi Fever

by CALKelseyngmd Posted on May 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Read what Martin Longman says today about Benghazi. If you want to understand the origins of Benghazi fever in the fever swamps of the right, I think he has it right. It was basically born out of shame at the initial conservative reaction to the attacks combined with rage that they finally got called on their vile behavior, which ended up helping Obama win reelection.

If you need to refresh your memory about the details—which you really should—see my real-time reaction here: Day 1, Day 2, Day 2.1, Day 2.2.

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Here Are the Origins of Benghazi Fever

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Donald Sterling is a Creepy Egomaniac

by Glenn10Daxplpsh Posted on April 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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I don’t have much to add about the whole Donald Sterling affair. The appalling nature of his comments is pretty obvious, after all. But for those of you who don’t live in Los Angeles, I thought I could at least acquaint you with a tiny tidbit about the guy’s titanic level of egotism that you might find fascinating. Sterling is a major advertiser in the LA Times. I don’t mean Sterling’s companies. I mean Sterling, himself. He gives away lots of money, and when he does he makes sure everyone knows about it. Ads thanking Sterling for his good deeds simply litter the Times.

The one below, from today’s paper, is typical. They’re all the same: they have terrible, amateur production values; they all use the exact same cutout portrait of Sterling; and they all feature photos of the people honoring Sterling that look like they were taken with a 60s-era Instamatic. These ads appear multiple times a week. Sometimes multiple times a day. Sterling is constantly being honored for something or other, and every single honor is an occasion for him to advertise the fact in the LA Times. And always with the exact same cutout photo of himself. It’s kind of creepy.

Sterling’s vanity ad today happens to be on a page facing an ad that features Kobe Bryant pitching Turkish Airlines. The irony was amusing enough that I figured I’d share.

UPDATE: More here from Franklin Avenue, who’s been tracking Sterling’s ads for years.

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Donald Sterling is a Creepy Egomaniac

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College Doesn’t Pay Off for Everyone

by RichelleButterf Posted on April 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Why has college enrollment edged downward in recent years? After all, the college premium is still pretty handsome, which makes a university degree a pretty good investment. Dean Baker thinks the answer might lie in how the college premium is distributed:

Work by my colleague John Schmitt and Heather Boushey shows that a substantial proportion of college grads, especially male college grads, earn less than the average high school grad. They found that the lowest earning quintile of recent college grads (ages 25-34) earned less than the average high school grad. The implication is that many young people may be reasonably assessing their risks of not being a winner among college grads and therefore opting not to get additional education. To get more young people to attend college it is important that most can predictably benefit from the additional education, not just that the average pay of college grads rises.

I’m not sure I buy this. Schmitt and Boushey present the chart on the right, and sure enough, the lowest ten percent of college grads (red line) earn less than the average high school grad. But this has always been true. What’s more, it’s actually less true today than in the past. Among both men and women, even the lowest-achieving college grad is relatively better off now than in 1980.

Even if the bottom 10 percent are still worse off than an average high school grad, I’m not sure how a rising trend could lead to lower assessments of the value of college paying off. It seems like there must be more going on here than that.

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College Doesn’t Pay Off for Everyone

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