Im-Politic: A Small Step Toward Quality Journalism ( I Hope)

Tags

Atlanta, crime, editing, Georgia, Im-Politic, journalism, Mainstream Media, Sally Buzbee, Tim Craig, Washington Post

It was not only great news that the Washington Post‘s new Executive Editor, Sally Buzbee, has just announced that the paper will hire 41 new editors. It’s urgently needed news, as made painfully clear by this September 13 article on rising crime in Atlanta, Georgia – which violates one of the most important rules of good journalism: Don’t try to shoehorn an article into a certain narrative when you’ve presented almost no supporting evidence.

The narrative chosen by reporter Tim Craig and evidently approved by enough editors to warrant publication is plainly stated in the headline: “Brutal killing of a woman and her dog in an Atlanta park reignites the debate over city’s growing crime problem.” It’s hardly unheard of for headlines to clash with the body of their story, or to exaggerate the findings. After all, nearly news organizations are private businesses, they need to make money, and what better way to generate the kinds of eyeballs that will make advertisers pay top dollar than clickbait – which of course is journalism’s version of flashy packaging.

And sometimes, headline writers just make innocent mistakes, and place such labels on stories too late for the reporter to object – or even an editor to spot it. That’s not a capital crime, especially when we’re dealing with a form of communication that’s often necessarily hastily composed.

But the claim of a “debate” on crime convulsing the city wasn’t confined to the headline. Craig himself wrote that Atlanta’s crime rate is dominating the political debate in Georgia, a state that is expected to be key in next year’s midterm elections. Georgia Republicans believe a tough-on-crime message offers them a chance to win back suburban Atlanta-area voters after the party suffered punishing losses in last year’s presidential and U.S. Senate contests.”

Meanwhile, “many Democrats,” readers are told, dismiss [such] concerns as a partisan effort to rally conservatives to the polls by stoking fear….”

The above link documents that Atlanta crime is definitely influencing city and state politics. But what’s weird about Craig’s story is that it per se offers almost no examples of such clashing opinions.

Toward the end of the article, Craig quotes a single resident fretting that “state Republicans will use the city’s crime problem to their political advantage.” But even she both acknowledges a “crime problem,” calls it “unbelievable” and “said she thinks some of the city’s Democratic leaders went too far last year by embracing calls to shift resources away from the police.”

The only Democratic politician whose views are presented – Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis, told Craig that Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp, who’s up for reelection next year and has focused on the crime issue, “is right to be concerned” because “the city’s criminal justice system is overwhelmed amid a shortage of police officers and ballistics experts needed to help solve crimes.”

This is a debate on crime? Or even close?

In fact, the rest of Craig’s article is devoted almost exclusively to a wide variety of Atlantans emphasizing how serious the city’s crime problem is and worrying that if some dramatically different strategy to fight it isn’t adopted soon, its economy could suffer and its “community cohesion, vitality and civility” could be damaged. (One exception to the head of a local business booster group – who’s basically paid to be optimistic.)

Just as important, no one mentioned in the article voiced any support for defunding police or “reimagining public safety” to focus on non-coercive ways to reduce crime or any of the other police reform proposals that mushroomed following George Floyd’s 2020 murder by a Minneapolis police officer.

Spotting such internal contradictions isn’t the only editing problem experienced lately by the Post (or other major news organizations). As known by RealityChek regulars, the output of these outlets regularly contains major factual mistakes, ignores crucial context, presents too narrow a range of opinion, and relies on experts plainly not worthy of the title (to name just a few of their leading shortcomings).

So let’s hope Buzbee’s hiring decision stems from a recognition of these problems (rather than a desire to add new bells and whistles to their websites and the like), and that lots of other news organizations follow suit. Her newspaper’s latest motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” spotlights the essential role journalism plays in protecting Americans’ freedoms. She and her peers should also remember that the trust on which this role is based will weaken further in incompetence.

Making News: Video of China Panel Presentation Now On-Line

Tags

China, conservatives, economics, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Making News, national security, Trade

I’m pleased to announce that the podcast is now on-line of my participation in a late July panel discussion on “China, Geonomics, and Great Power Competition.” Here’s the link.

The event was especially interesting because it was held as part of a conference put on by the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), and because for decades intellectually honest conservatives have been torn over the question of how and even whether to respond to China’s wide-ranging economic predation. (As with liberals, other conservatives have simply served as corporate-funded backers of coddling China.)   

On the one hand, many have recognized that growing national economic power (which China has amassed largely through its tariffs, technology blackmail, intellectual property theft, and other practices having nothing to do with free trade or any form of free markets) tends to translate into growing national military power. Therefore, some limits on doing business with the People’s Republic have always been considered justified (e.g., no arms sales). On the other hand, even these conservatives’ fundamental opposition to limits on economic activity has bred a decided reluctance to endorse any but the most threadbare curbs – which folks like me have viewed as pathetically inadequate (for reasons I lay out).

As ISI has explained, the purpose of the overall conference was to “hash out what a conservative approach to the economy should look like today” – which reflects its admirable willingness to reexamine longstanding dogmas. So IMO, the Institute deserves a lot of credit for including China policy on this list, and I’m grateful to have been included in this piece of the process. P.S.  I attended most of the rest of the conference, and found the treatment of other issues fascinating. If ISI posts the entire event at one link, I’ll pass it along as soon as I can find it.   

In the meantime, keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments. 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Will the Foreign Policy Experts – Finally – Start Learning Some Geography?

Tags

Afghanistan, Biden, Blob, Bloomberg.com, CNN.com, Europe, geography, globalism, Jeremy Shapiro, Luke McGee, Mainstream Media, Marc Champion, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Robert D. Kaplan, The Economist

I’m thrilled to report that I may have jumped the gun in my post last Wednesday in scoffing at the possibility of President Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal – and the broader U.S. failure in that Forever War – would resulting in any major changes in America’s needlessly risky and costly globalist approach to foreign policy.

I’m not saying that the two-decade Afghanistan fiasco and its humiliating final chapter will spur a search for real alternatives in the foreseeable future, or even that significant new strategies will ever be put into effect – at least not without a much bigger disaster reflecting the same kinds of mistakes. But it’s nonetheless remarkable not only that any unconventional idea has appeared – especially given the determination of the strongly globalist Mainstream Media to suppress them – but that the one that has surfaced challenges the root assumption of globalism.

Specifically, some establishment voices are, inchoately to be sure, pointing out that for all the worries understandably expressed by Americans about new threats to their security appearing in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, Europe faces much greater threats. The reason, moreover, is that it’s located much closer to Afghanistan than the United States.

In other words, geography counts, and America’s position halfway around the world from this troubled region and its utterly dysfunctional Middle East neighborhood, and separated from them and from its leading adversaries by wide oceans, is a leading contributor to its security that creates options enjoyed by no other major power.

Further, by implication – given that these points are being made in the context of the United States concluding that a Taliban victory in Afghanistan is acceptable after all – one of the most important of these options when many forms of trouble arise in any number of locales abroad is simple non-involvement.

The importance of America’s unique geography and its advantages may seem screamingly obvious. But as I’ve explained in detail (see, e.g., here and here), it has not only been ignored by generations of globalist American leaders and thinkers literally since Pearl Harbor. It’s been actively rejected.

Instead, the prevailing foreign policy conventional wisdom has consistently held that peace and security around the world make up a seamless whole, and that war and aggression and even instability anywhere across the globe are matters of urgent concern to the United States and must be squelched or resisted ASAP lest they mestastasize and directly endanger the American homeland.

Some of these “Geography matters”-type statements have been made by members of America’s most prominent and influential proponents of universal and open-ended foreign policy activism – the so-called Blob. This Washington, D.C.-centered bipartisan agglomeration of globalist former diplomats and Congressional aides, retired military officers, genuine academics, and think tank hacks shapes American diplomacy in two critical ways.

First, it represents the main personnel pool drawn on to staff presidential administrations and House and Senate offices on rotating bases, and also serves as key informal sources of advice for these politicians. In other words, it’s a central portion of what’s often called the “permanent bureaucracy” (and by some, the “Deep State”), whose combination of experience (which of course has unmistakable value), sheer staying power, and skill at projecting an air of authority (which clearly have much less intrinsic value) enables it often to steer policy independent of what elected officials favor – and especially to keep the status quo alive through inertia-reenforcing foot-dragging and even sabotage.

Second, the Blob powerfully influences what so many Americans read, hear, and see about foreign policy by dominating the list of sources used by Mainstream Media journalists (who are predominantly sympatico by virtue of shared elite educations and clubby intertwined social networks) to report and interpret the news. The resulting permeation of reporting and analysis with Blob-y globalist perspectives goes far toward defining for the public which foreign policy ideas are and aren’t legitimate to discuss.

That’s why I was so gobsmacked when Blob mainstay Robert D. Kaplan wrote in the (ardently globalist British magazine) The Economist that

“America is a vast and wealthy continent densely connected by navigable rivers and with an economy of scale, accessible to the main sea lines of communication, yet protected by oceans from the turmoil of the Old World.

“And that geography still matters, despite technology having shrunk the globe….”

As a result, Kaplan added that “geography helps explain why America can miscalculate and fail in successive wars, yet completely recover, unlike smaller and less well-situated countries which have little margin for error.” Moreover, logically speaking (and these are my views, not Kaplan’s), the very geography-grounded security that enables the United States to recover quickly from (at least most) foreign involvements that produce disastrous consequences means that it was never significantly vulnerable to the perceived threats that led to that involvement to begin with.

Similar opinions have been offered by former senior U.S. official Jeremy Shapiro, who argues that post-Afghanistan, the United States “can and will work effectively with allies, but only when its vital interests are at stake. It sees those interests in the competition with China. Increasingly, however, in places such as central Asia, the Sahel, and perhaps even Europe’s eastern neighbourhood, it does not.”

By contrast, he observed, “Europeans have more direct interests at stake in those places.”

Further, some Mainstream Media journalists have followed suit – providing further evidence that such once utterly heretical notions are now being bandied about in some Blob-y circles.

For example, Bloomberg.com‘s Marc Champion has contended that

“The U.S. left Afghanistan on Tuesday humbled and with few of its goals achieved after 20 years of war. For America’s European allies, the humiliation may just be starting.

“Connected to Afghanistan by land, unlike the U.S., for Europe the return of the Taliban presents more concrete threats. Those include not just terrorism but also mass migration and the heroin trade.”

More vividly, a recent CNN.com post was headlined, “Europe left exposed as Biden walks America away from the world stage.” It seems reasonable to infer that if the headline writer – and his editors – regarded America as exposed, too, they’d have mentioned that danger explicitly. Indeed, correspondent Luke McGee went on to report that “Multiple European officials and diplomats told CNN of their shock at Biden’s assertion that the only US interest in Afghanistan was to neutralize the terrorists who attacked the US in 2001 and prevent further attacks on American soil.

“They now fear the humanitarian and political consequences of mass migration from a country run by militants who’ve historically harbored terrorists and that is connected to mainland Europe by land” – unlike, I’d remind again, the United States.

Again, I’m not saying that an intellectual revolution in U.S. foreign policy is on the horizon. But as suggested above, only a few weeks ago, I couldn’t have imagined seeing so many examples of any of the above in so short a timespan.

On balance, I’m still convinced that the Blob will wind up stamping out such dissent, at least within its own ranks – if only because at the end of the day, so few would be employable in a truly post-globalist America. But many Blob-ers are also savvy enough to recognize a potentially sinking ship. So I feel pretty confident in predicting that the longer lousy headlines and optics keep emanating from Afghanistan, the more of these globalists will start appreciating the virtues of America’s geography.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: How Much Change Will the Afghanistan Debacle Really Bring?

Tags

Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Biden, Central America, Donald Trump, failed states, globalism, Immigration, migration, nation-building, Northern Triangle, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, terrorism, The National Interest, Vietnam War

Since just yesterday, two big articles in the Mainstream Media have told us that President Biden’s latest speech on America’s (going-going-gone?) military involvement in Afghanistan could usher in a new, more circumspect era for U.S. foreign policy. (See here and here.) Me, I’m not so sure, even though I’d like to see nothing better, since I’ve been calling for such changes for no fewer than 35 years.

In fact, it’s not even clear whether Mr. Biden’s decision to pull the plug on this longest of America’s wars will profoundly influence America’s approach to world affairs on the level of day-to-day operations. For example, the President has insisted that “I was not going to extend this forever war. And I was not extending a forever exit”; and that with the Al Qaeda threat to attack the U.S. homeland and American allies squelched; and that the United States has “no vital interest in Afghanistan.” Nonethless, he still declared that “We will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries.”

Moreover, Mr. Biden acknowledged that the “over-the-horizon capabilities” that now enable attacks on “terrorists and targets” without fighting ground wars (through drone strikes and the like) will still require some “American boots on the ground.” That’s because you need some physical presence in order to identify and track the targets (which move around a lot), and because these forces need bases of some kind out of which to operate.

Further, the President claimed that “The terror threat has metastasized across the world, well beyond Afghanistan. We face threats from Al Shabab in Somalia, Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria and the Arabian Peninsula, and ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates across Africa and Asia.”

Even if he thinks that those over-the-horizon capabilities can suddenly meet this challenge (and obviously, they can’t now, or else we’d have seen a lot more of them and a much faster Afghanistan troop pullout), we’re talking about a non-trivial number of American boots on the ground in a huge number of countries – including more than a few states as failed, or as always-mythical, as Afghanistan.

President Biden was also pretty emphatic about “moving on” from what he suggested was the post-September 11 mindset of nation-building in places like Afghanistan – where democracy and unity and even cohesion has “never” existed.

But take another look at his “Strategy to Address the Root Causes of Migration in Central America.” The idea is to turn El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras into places acceptable enough to live in to convince huge portions of their populations to remain there, rather than seek better lives in the United States. And to achieve this aim, the administration’s blueprint “identifies, prioritizes, and coordinates actions to improve security, governance, human rights, and economic conditions in the region.”

That sounds pretty nation building-y to me, even if you believe that, unlike Afghanistan, these “Northern Triangle” countries have ever deserved to be called “nations” to begin with – rather than simply relatively large groups of very poor people exploited by (rotating) smaller groups of people possessing enough money and guns to climb to and stay on top for a while.

And since all the countries and regions that Mr. Biden has identified as new sources of terrorism suffer many of the same problems, there’s no reason to rule out the administration eventually dreaming up similar plans for them. According to the President’s speech, that would certainly be preferable to putting more American military boots on the ground.

But there’s a more fundamental reason to doubt that the President will engineer a major shift even in nation-building-type policies, much less in American foreign policy’s broader direction: Although the label didn’t emerge until after the September 11 attacks, nation-building has always been a core precept of the globalist approach that American foreign policy has carried out since Pearl Harbor, and Mr. Biden is a long-time card-carrying globalist. That’s the “back” to which he so proudly proclaimed America would return during his presidency.  

I explained what I mean by that most recently in a 2018 article for The National Interest. Globalism’s root assumption, I wrote, “has stemmed from the ostensibly timeless lessons of the nation’s 1930s indifference to aggression in Europe and Asia: that America’s security, freedom and prosperity are inseparable from the security, freedom and prosperity of a critical mass of the rest of the world in which trouble anywhere is sure to spread like wildfire unless checked.” And to prevent such contagions from emerging to begin with, “the entire global environment needed to be managed adequately” – including turning failed states and other breeding grounds for terrorism and all sorts of turmoil and instability into entities that are substantially better, or at least more tranquil.

That same article pointed out, however, that globalism’s grip on American foreign policy is so tight that even an avowed disrupter and America First champion like Donald Trump couldn’t shake it off completely – and even doubled down on some major globalist policies (like deepening America’s – nuclear – commitment to Europe’s security against Russian expansionism). Indeed, his Middle East and anti-terrorism policies were especially conflicted – as he himself admitted.

So the likeliest transformation I can envision for post-Afghanistan U.S. foreign policy is what I’ve called “globalism on the cheap” – retaining every ounce of this strategy’s grandiose objectives, but pretending that they can be pursued exclusively in neat, safe, and aesthetically appealing ways. In fact, this was the course chosen after another foreign policy debacle – the Vietnam War. And revealingly, Mr. Biden touted some of them yesterday: “diplomacy, economic tools, and rallying the rest of the world for support” (along with those over-the-horizon capabilities).

These and other tactics in principle can have their place in U.S. foreign policy, depending on circumstances. But calling them substitutes for major military deployments and operations in carrying out a globalist strategy is first-order misinformation spreading. And it makes me wonder just how damagingly globalism, on the cheap or otherwise, will need to fail before genuinely new foreign policy eras will begin.

 

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: More Trade Normality Revealed in New GDP Figures – But for How Long?

Tags

CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Delta variant, exports, GDP, goods trade, gross domestic product, imports, inflation-adjusted growth, lockdowns, real exports, real GDP, real imports, real trade deficit, recession, recovery, services trade, Trade, trade deficit, Wuhan virus, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Last month, I reported that the trade highlights of the first official read on U.S. economic growth in the second quarter of this year showed signs that some form of normality was returning to the nation’s international trade flows after months of unprecedented pandemic-era fluctuations. This morning, the second government estimate of the second quarter gross domestic product (GDP) came out (next month we’ll see the final version – for now), and the signs of a new normality look even stronger.

Specifically, the sequential growth of America’s inflation-adjusted trade deficit during this period was even slower than the slowish rate presented in last month’s GDP release – and using the phrase “to a crawl” seems justified in describing the pace.

That initial estiimate revealed that the real trade gap’s quarterly widening had slowed from the sizzling 31.81 percent in the third quarter of last year, when the economy was roaring back from its brief but epic CCP Virus- and lockdown-induced crash dive to just 2.69 percent between this April and June (a strong growth period itself, but nothing compared with the initial recession rebound). Today, however, the after-inflation trade shortfall’s expansion came in at just 1.71 percent for the second quarter – when real growth itself clocked in at 6.40 percent on an annual basis, not the 6.35 percent estimated last month.

The new number for the second quarter’s price-adjusted trade deficit, $1.2471 billion annualized, remains astronomical by any reasonable standard. Not only is it still the biggest such figure in absolute terms. It’s the biggest such figure in relative terms – as a share of real GDP – where it still stands at 6.44 percent. And this revised trade deficit remains the fourth straight all-time high recorded. For some more perspective, the inflation-adjusted gap is also still 47.13 percent wider than where it stood in the fourth quarter of 2019 ($847.6 billion), just before the pandemic and its effect began weakening and distorting the economy.

More encouragingly, though, the new trade deficit result is a significant improvement over the $1.2590 trillion first reported. Also on the plus side, the after-inflation trade deficit’s sequential rise cut only 0.24 percentage points from the quarter’s 6.40 percent growth at an annual rate. That is, had the second quarter deficit stayed at its first quarter level, second quarter growth would have been 6.64 percent annualized – or 3.75 percent faster.

It all adds up to the trade deficit’s best such effect on real GDP change in absolute terms since the second quarter of 2020, when the deficit’s shrinkage prevented the nearly 36 percent pandemic-produced real GDP plunge from becoming slightly worse. By contrast, in the first quarter of this year, the inflation-adjusted trade shortfall’s increase cut the 6.14 percent annualized real growth figure by 1.56 percentage point. So had there been no sequential increase at all, that quarter’s price-adjusted growth would have been 7.70 percent at annual rates – a difference of fully 25.41 percent.

The manner in which the second quarter’s constant dollar trade gap improved over the initial read was good news as well, as after-inflation exports rose faster and their import counterparts climbed more slowly than reported last month.

Rather than growing by 1.47 percent sequentially during the second quarter, total after-inflation exports were judged to have advanced by 1.60 percent. At $2.2980 trillion annualized, though, they’re still 9.98 percent lower than in the fourth quarter of 2019 – the last full quarter before the CCP Virus’ arrival. As a result, the second quarter’s real export performance was an even greater improvement over the first quarter’s 0.73 percent dip than previously thought.

Combined goods and services imports were reported up by 1.64 percent between the first and second quarters, not 1.90 percent, as originally reported. This new figure also beat the first quarter’s 2.25 percent sequential real import increase.

At the same time, the new inflation-adjusted total import figure of $3.5547 trillion annualized still represents their second straight quarterly record, and such purchases from abroad are still 4.26 percent higher than their fourth quarter, 2019 level.

Turning to goods (the vast majority of U.S. trade flows), the second GDP read for the second quarter left standing their dubious record of a fourth straight all-time high trade deficit. But as with the overall trade deficit, the new figure of $1.4014 trillion annualized was a solid improvement from the previously reported $1.4610 trillion. And as a result, the second quarter number was only marginally (0.40 percent) worse than the first quarter figure, making clear a major slowdown in this indicator’s rise as well (from 20.40 percent during last year’s super-growth third quarter).

Unfortunately, the revised second quarter real service trade figures told a story that was especially gloomy even given this sector’s well known and disproportionate virus- and lockdown-induced woes. The long-running service trade surplus is now pegged at $149.5 billion for the April-through-June period. That’s a figure lower than the $151.2 billion previously reported, and the weakest quarterly result since the $161.7 billion recorded in the third quarter of 2010, when the recovery from the 2007-2008 financial crisis and Great Recession was in its earliest stages.

Also unfortunate – and frustrating: Whatever is shown in the final (for now) second quarter GDP report, the results will be pre-Delta variant. So although today’s data shows trade normalization to be even closer than previously thought, that next set could be of limited use at best in figuring out how long it’s going to last.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Blaming Extra Unemployment Benefits for U.S. Labor Shortages Just Got a Lot Harder

Tags

CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Employment, Jobs, labor markets, labor shortages, recession, unemployment, unemployment benefits, workers, {What's Left of) Our Economy

If you’ve been following the economic news for the last few months, you know that one of the most heated policy debates that’s broken out concerns the impact of the supplemental federal unemployment claims that America’s jobless became eligible for due to the CCP Virus- and lockdowns-induced recession and its continuing aftermath.

Specifically, opponents of these payments – which will end for all states on September 6 (unless they don’t?) – charge that they’ve needlessly enabled many workers to avoid or delay returning to businesses, and thereby greatly worsened labor shortages reported by so many employers. Supporters insist that they’ve been a minor contributor, and that the shortages stem from many more important factors, like ongoing health concerns or childcare issues or the apparent decision of many Baby Boomers and near-Boomers that the pandemic created a convenient time to retire.

I’ve believed for months that the biggest truth has been “all of the above,” but have been frustrated by the lack of statistics that could at least start providing reasonably convincing answers. And unfortunately, this post’s appearance doesn’t mean that terrific data has been found. But what I’ve gone over in the last few days seems reasonably informative, and what it tells me is that the extra federal benefits haven’t been a significant deal at all in the U.S. jobs picture.

What I did was compare four indicators of employment for the states that announced that they’d stop paying those extra benefits by the end of June (along with Louisiana, which announced a July 31 cutoff) and for the states that have decided to continue them as long as Washington was sending the funds. The indicators are unemployment rates, numbers of people employed, first-time jobless claims filed, and levels of continuing jobless claims. And recent Labor Department reports make possible comparing the unemployment rates between June and July, and both sets of claims numbers between the week ending June 26 and the week ending July 24. So they should provide some information on whether the announcement of imminent cutoffs led the jobless to secure reemployment faster.

These data can’t provide definitive answers for numerous reasons. For example, as this article makes clear, the $300 extra federal benefits on which I concentrated haven’t been the only extra benefits provided during the pandemic, and even six of the “early cutoff” states have continued to provide some combination of the others. In addition, two of the early cutoff states have been under court orders to continue the benefits (Indiana and Maryland), and lawsuits are pending in three others (Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas.) Moreover, state benefit levels vary tremendously, both in terms of payment amounts and eligibility periods. So depending on where they live, unemployed Americans could have lost various extended benefits and still received benefits from their state governments (for varying timeframes) generous enough to affect their need or desire to return to work.

But what follows is a pretty good start to the search for answers. And analysts do get one break: The states plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia to be examined divide evenly into two groups of 26.

First, the jobless rate comparisons. As widely known, these aren’t perfect measures of the national employment situation because they leave out big categories of distressed workers like those too discouraged to even search for a job, and those employed part-time because they have no other choice. And as suggested above, they shed no light on changes in the numbers of retirees.

Be that as it may, of the 26 cutoff states, between June and July, unemployment rates fell in 19, rose in three, and held steady in four. And of the twenty cutoff states where no litigation was either affecting payment policies or coming down the pike, and excluding tardy Louisiana, jobless rates fell in 16, rose in two, and remained unchanged in two.

How does that compare with the unemployment rates in the non-cutoff states? They fell in 18 of the 26 states between June and July, rose in four, and held steady in four. So I don’t see a big difference there.

Turning to employment levels, of the 26 total cutoff states, from June to July, they rose in 23 and fell in three. Of the twenty facing no litigation issues and, again, also excepting Louisiana, employment levels rose in 19 and fell in one. Those results actually slightly lag the performance of the non-cutoff states, where employment levels rose in 25 of the 26 between June and July.

It’s much the same story for initial jobless claims from the week ending June 26 and the week ending July 24. For the 26 total cutoff states, initial claims between these two weeks rose in six and fell in 20. Of the 20 facing no legal issues, and excepting Louisiana, claims rose in five and fell in 15.

That’s almost identical to the results for the non-cutoff states, where initial claims between those two weeks rose in five states and fell in 21. In fact, a slight edge goes to these states on this score, too.

Finally, for continuing claims, in the 26 total cutoff states, these fell in 21 and rose in five between the weeks in question. And of the 20 with no litigation existing or pending, and excluding tardy Louisiana, continuing claims fell in 15 and rose in five.

In this group of 26, 22 saw continuing claims fall and four saw the rise.

Again, I’m not contending that these numbers are definitive. More detailed analysis accounting for more of the aforementioned differences among states would help a lot. Nor do I doubt that labor shortages have emerged in some parts of the economy. But if there’s proof out there that the extended unemployment benefits had much impact, it hasn’t emerged yet – and let’s hope it emerges before the economy runs aground for an extended period again.  

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: No Delta Effect on U.S. Manufacturing Growth In Sight. Yet.

Tags

aerospace, aircraft, aircraft parts, appliances, automotive, Boeing, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Delta variant, electrical components, electrical equipment, fabricated metal products, Fed, Federal Reserve, inflation-adjusted growth, inflation-adjusted output, machinery, manufacturing, medical supplies, medicines, personal protective equipment, petroleum and coal products, pharmaceuticals, plastics, PPE, real growth, recovery, reopening, rubber, textiles, vaccines, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The after-inflation U.S. manufacturing production data reported today by the Federal Reserve revealed plenty of newsy developments. But my choice for biggest is the finding that, in price-adjusted terms, domestic manufacturers’ output finally nosed back above its last pre-CCP Virus (February, 2020) level.

The new number isn’t an all-time high – that came in December, 2007, just as the financial crisis was about to plunge the entire U.S. economy into its worst non-pandemic-related downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. As of this July, real manufacturing production is still 5.94 percent below that peak.

Measured in constant dollars, however, such output is now 1.15 percent greater than just before the virus arrived in the United States in force. Not much, and of course any Delta variant-prompted curbs on economic activity or extra caution in consumer behavior could wipe out this progress. But you know what they say about a journey of a thousand miles.

Had this milestone not been reached, I’d have led off this post by noting that although some really unusual seasonal factors in the volatile automotive sector definitely juiced the excellent July sequential output gain, U.S.-based industry outside automotive performed impressively during the month as well.

Specifically, as the Fed’s press release noted, the whopping 11.24 percent jump in the price-adjusted output of vehicles and parts contributed about half of overall manufacturing’s 1.39 percent growth. That automotive figure was the best monthly improvement since the 29.39 percent rocket ride the sector generated in July, 2020 – when the whole economy was staging its rebound from that spring’s deep but brief virus-induced recession. And that overall real on-month production advance was the best for manufacturing in general since the 3.39 percent achieved in March – earlier in the initial post-pandemic recovery.

But in July, the rest of domestic industry still expanded by a strong 0.70 percent after inflation – its best inflation-adjusted growth since the 3.31 percent also recorded in March.

The revisions in this morning’s Fed data for the entire manufacturing sector were mixed. June’s initially reported 0.05 percent decline is now judged to be a 0.10 percent increase, and April’s previously reported 0.39 percent drop now stands as a 0.21 percent decrease. But May’s last reported increase – upgraded slightly to a strong 0.92 percent – is now estimated at just 0.65 percent.

Looking at broad industry categories, the big real output July winners in domestic manufacturing’s ranks aside from automotive were electrical equipment, appliances, and components (up 2.31 percent); plastics and rubber products (up 2.02 percent); machinery (1.91 percent); the broad aerospace and miscellaneous transportation sector (think “Boeing”), which rose by 1.90 percent; textiles (up 1.67 percent); and miscellaneous durable goods, which includes but is hardly confined to many pandemic-related medical supplies (up 1.55 percent).

As I keep noting, good machinery growth is especially encouraging, since its goods are used both throughout manufacturing and the economy as a whole, and strong demand signals optimism among manufacturers about their future prospects – which tends to feed on itself and impart continued momentum to industry.

The list of significant losers was much shorter, with real fabricated metal products output 0.42 percent lower than June levels and petroleum and coal products shrinking by 0.60 percent.

Turning to narrower manufacturing categories that remain in the news, despite Boeing’s still serious manufacturing and safety problems, and ongoing CCP Virus-created weakness in air transport, inflation-adjusted production of aircraft and parts continued its strong recent run. June’s initially reported 5.24 percent monthly output surge was revised down to 3.57 percent. But that’s still excellent by any measure. And July saw production climb another 2.78 percent. As a result, real output in this sector is now 9.95 percent higher than it was just before the pandemic’s arrival in the United States in February, 2020.

Real output in the pharmaceuticals and medicines sector (which includes vaccines) grew by 0.77 percent sequentially in July, and its real output is now 11.35 percent greater than just before the pandemic. But those revisions!

June’s initially reported 0.89 percent increase is now judged to be a 0.34 percent decrease, and May’s previously downgraded 0.15 percent rise has now been upgraded all the way to 1.54 percent.

An even better July was registered by the vital medical equipment and supplies sector – which includes virus-fighting items like face masks, face masks, protective gowns, and ventilators. Monthly growth came in at 1.71 percent. But revisions here were puzzling, too.

June’s initially reported 0.99 percent sequential real production improvement is now seen as a major 1.54 percent falloff. And May’s monthly constant dollar growth, already upgraded from 0.19 percent to 1.18 percent, is now pegged at 1.86 percent.

I’m still optimistic about domestic manufacturing’s outlook, and that’s still based on domestic manufacturers’ own continued optimism – which as shown by the two major private sector monthly manufacturing surveys remained strong in July. (See here and here.)

But I also continue to view U.S. public health authorities’ judgment as suspect when it comes to the balance that needs to be struck between fighting the virus and keeping the economy satisfactorily open. So as long as new virus variants pose the threat of higher infection rates (though not at all necessarily of greater damage to Americans’ health), my own optimism has become more tempered.

Im-Politic: A Phony Iceland CCP Virus Saga

Tags

CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, hospitalizations, Iceland, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, misinformation, Reis Thebault, Washington Post, Worldometers.info, Wuhan virus

If you still doubt that the Mainstream Media are determined to uphold the CCP Virus vaccination narrative pushed by America’s public health, political, and business establishments (for starters), whatever the data say, check out the Washington Post‘s article yesterday about Iceland’s experience with vaccinations.

According to reporter Reis Thebault (and his editors), “online misinformation and conspiratorial social media posts” have portrayed the island country as a tale of vaccination failure because despite its high jab rate. Their rationale:

“Just one month after the government scrapped all covid-19 restrictions, masks, social distancing and capacity limits have returned. And U.S. authorities last week warned Americans to stay away.”

But this reasoning is bogus, Post readers are told, and in truth, “infectious-disease experts say Iceland’s outbreak actually illustrates how effective the vaccines are at preventing the virus’s most severe impacts.”

How come? Because “Many of the country’s recent infections have occurred among vaccinated people, but they’ve been overwhelmingly mild. So even as new cases multiplied, Iceland’s rates of covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths have remained low.”

And here’s the kicker: “Of the 1,300 people currently infected, just 2 percent are in the hospital. The country hasn’t recorded a virus death since late May.”

Iceland’s mortality performance is indeed impressive. As the Post‘s very convenient virus tracker shows, the United States is still suffering several hundred virus deaths per day. And that looks like proof positive that the island’s full innoculation rate of 71 percent deserves much and even most credit.

At the same time, the latest U.S. vaccination rate (50.7 percent) may not be low enough relatively speaking to account for this kind of lethality gap between the two countries. Maybe the fact that Iceland’s population is fewer than 360,000 (you read that right), which is 0.11 percent of the American total of some 330,000,000 has something to do with the difference? Not to mention high levels of U.S. demographic diversity versus Iceland’s near genetic homogeneity?

But where the Iceland success story unmistakably falls apart is on the hospitalization front. For all the alarm generated by the virus’ super-contagious Delta variant, the CCP Virus death rate remains remarkably modest – 1.69 percent of all those Americans infected, and 0.19 percent of the entire population.

That’s no doubt why hospitalization rates (reasonably) have attracted so much attention lately in the context of the vaccination debate, which has intensified because of the unexpectedly large numbers of “breakthrough” CCP Virus cases recorded among the fully innoculated. (See, e.g., here.)

As legitimately contended by champions of vaccines (and typically of vaccine mandates and passports and similar restrictions), protecting against serious illness matters crucially, too. So the very low levels of hospitalization among the vaccinated (figures which surely are pretty accurate because anyone who gets sick enough to require hospitalization is likely to seek hospitalization) argue powerfully for getting jabbed. In turn, for humanitarian reasons, they militate for supporting whatever carrots and sticks are needed to overcome hesitancy among the unvaccinated.

Of course, none of this clinches the broader case for maximum vaccination or for mandates, passports, and similar restrictions. The reasons, as I’ve previously explained, range from the unreliability of much CCP Virus-related death data to the immunity already enjoyed by those unvaccinated (either because they’re naturally virus resistant or because they’ve acquired immunity by recovering from the virus).  And don’t forget the low risk of transmission from the unvaccinated to the vaccinated (which follows inevitably from the claim that the vaccines are indeed highly effective). 

But let’s say hypothetically that none of these complications exist, and that hospitalization data really is the gold standard for success against the CCP Virus. In that case, Iceland’s record still wouldn’t look so great, especially compared to America’s. Indeed, Iceland’s hospitalization rate is actually higher today than the United States’.

Thebault’s article reports that “Of the 1,300 [Icelanders] currently infected, just 2 percent are in the hospital.” Here, however, are the U.S. data: 82,352 Americans currently hospitalized by the virus (straight from the Post’s virus tracker) out of 6,676,932 current active virus cases (from the also reliable Worldometers.info site – because the Post doesn’t seem to track current cases, as opposed to cumulative cases).

That’s a hospitalization rate of 1.23 percent. And since the way I was taught arithmetic, 1.23 percent is lower than two percent.

As indicated above, none of this means that vaccines per se are pointless.  Instead, what it does mean is that some skepticism about the jabs’ impact, and about claims that they’d soon bring back normality, is entirely justified, and that consequently, vaccine-uber-alles proponents who live in (glassily transparent) misinformation houses themselves shouldn’t be throwing stones.

Those Stubborn Facts: More Public Health Costs of Covid Tunnel Vision

Tags

CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, mental health, public health, Those Stubborn Facts, Wuhan virus

Number of Americans who recently received mental health

counseling or therapy, late July, 2021: 22.3 million

Increase from late August, last year: 22.42 percent

Number of Americans saying they need mental health assistance but

aren’t getting it, July, 2021: 23.6 million

Increase from last summer: c. 33 percent

Number of Americans now taking prescription drugs to help with

emotional or mental health: 46.4 million

Increase from last summer: 24.06 percent

 

(Source: “U.S. Mental Health Under Growing Strain in Covid’s Second Summer,” by Alexandre Tanzi, Bloomberg.com, August 12, 2021, U.S. Mental Health Under Growing Strain in Covid’s Second Summer – Bloomberg)

Making News: Back on National Radio on Headline Economic Issues

Tags

infrastructure, Jobs, Making News, manufacturing, Market Wrap with Moe Ansari, productivity, tariffs, Trade

Sorry this is a little late, but I’m pleased to announce that I appeared on Tuesday, August 3, on Moe Ansari’s nationally syndicated “Market Wrap” radio program.

Click here and scroll down till you see my name for the podcast of the segment –  which dealt with leading economic issues ranging from the latest developments in U.S. trade policy to the health of our domestic manufacturing base to the prospects for major new federal infrastructure spending and what kind of boost it may give to the nation’s growth rate, its job creation, and its productivity.

The interview begins at about the 21:40 mark of the August 3 program.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments