Im-Politic: The Regime Media’s Illegal Aliens Cover-Up Continues

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Biden border crisis, child labor, Financial Times, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, labor productivity, Mainstream Media, meatpacking, productivity, Regime Media, UniParty, Washington Post, workers

The evidence keeps mounting that the Uniparty’s Regime Media will stop at almost nothing to cover up the costs of illegal immigration to the U.S. economy and American society. Just yesterday, as I tweeted, the Financial Times published a report claiming that a labor shortage fueled in large measure by flows of legal and illegal immigrants allegedly so inadequate that resulting worker shortages are imperiling President Biden’s infrastructure and manufacturing revival plans.

Only one problem: The reporter and her editors completely failed to mention that the wages offered by U.S. construction firms have gone exactly nowhere at best lately – which is hard to square with the idea that they’re desperate to hire.

And this morning, I noticed a Washington Post report on the shameful reappearance of illegal child labor in the United States – including child employees exposed to dangerous working conditions – that buried unmistakable signs that continuing inflows of illegal aliens obviously enabled by President Biden’s lax border enforcement policies bear at least much of the blame.

In the fifth paragraph, the article states that

“Child labor violations have been on the rise in the United States since 2015. The number of minors found to be employed in violation of child labor laws shot up by 37 percent between 2021 and 2022. The number of children found to be illegally employed in hazardous occupations, such as meatpacking and construction, spiked by 93 percent over the past seven years.”

That’s certainly important to know. And in the following graph, readers learn that “Experts say a historically tight labor market could be fueling this rise in violations, with employers tapping into new labor pools to fill vacancies across a variety of industries.”

But it’s not until paragraph seventeen that the piece even obliquely mentions the illegal aliens angle:

“Many of the children [working at the meatpacking facilities focused on in the article] spoke only Spanish, and at least some Labor Department interviews with minors were conducted in Spanish, investigators [who were probing labor law violations for the federal government] said.”

Yet the article still never disclosed why these unilingual children are in the country to begin with – no doubt because their presence is surely unlawful, and a testament to the humanitarian impact of the Open Borders-friendly immigration policies pushed so avidly and for so long by major U.S. news organizations.

Also conspicuously overlooked in this Post report – the harmful economic impact of the long-time absence of sensible immigration policies. In this case, strong productivity growth is the casualty, which matters decisively because ever greater efficiency is a key – and probably the most important key – to America’s ability to generate high and rising living standards. And the evidence could not be clearer that the ready availability of illegal alien labor has enabled the nation’s meat-processing industry to remain profitable without automating or shaking up management or reconfiguring its production lines or taking any other major steps to modernize.

I last looked at that sector’s lagging performance in labor productivity (where the data is most up to date) in May, 2020, and here’s where the situation stands now: In the non-durable manufacturing sector, where meat processing is found, from the first quarter of 1987 through the fourth quarter of last year improved by 71.62 percent. But between 1987 and 2021, it rose in “animal slaughtering and processing” by just 13.98 percent.

And for those doubting the illegal immigrant connection, this 2021 Fact Sheet, issued by an organization bent on highlighting “the many different ways that undocumented immigrants contribute to the food supply chain in the United States,” puts the number of illegal alien workers in slaughtering and processing companies at 82,700 in 2019. If that’s accurate, then according to the official employment data for that sector, that came to nearly one in every five employees at year!

The bottom line:  The resumed illegal immigration tide fostered by the Biden administration has helpd bring about resumed economic woes and exploitation. If I was shilling for the Cheap Labor Lobby, or ideologically wed to Open Borders, I guess I’d want to cover that up, too.   

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Im-Politic: A CCP Virus Lesson Learned and a Mystery Still Unsolved

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Biden, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, Donald Trump, hospitalizations, Im-Politic, mortality, National Center for Health Statistics, vaccines, Washington Post, Worldometers.info, Wuhan virus

As the third anniversary of the CCP Virus’ arrival in the United States approaches, new data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have upended a widely held belief about the U.S. government’s response, even as other recent statistics have left another conclusion firmly in place.

The upended belief: that President Biden has handled the pandemic much better than former President Trump. Recently released figures from the CDC say it ain’t so – at least when it comes to the virus’ death toll.

According to the agency’s National Center for Health Statistics, in 2020, the number of American deaths attributable to the CCP Virus was 350, 831. According to its latest report on the leading causes of mortality in the United States, Covid 19 took 416,893 lives in 2021. That’s an 18.83 percent increase.

In other words, in 2020, when Trump was President and his policies toward the pandemic were widely considered an unmitigated disaster (except for the Operation Warp Speed policy that produced vaccines in record time), the virus killed many fewer Americans than in 2021, when Joe Biden’s administration has gotten much better marks.

But maybe these results are skewed by the fact that the Trump Covid year only lasted eleven months (because the first recorded American CCP Virus death didn’t occur till February 29, 2020, and the Trump administration ended on January 20, 2021)? Nope. Even when you make the needed changes, and peg the start of the Biden administration in February, 2021, you get the same 18.83 percent gap (with monthly deaths under Trump coming in at 31,893 and under Mr. Biden at 37,899).

The big bump up in deaths under Biden are even stranger when you consider that when the pandemic hit the United States, it was a truly novel coronavirus, meaning that it was difficult to figure out what it even was, much less how rapidly it could spread (thanks in part to China’s refusal to share reliable information), let alone how to treat it. So healthcare providers (and public health agencies) literally were flying blind. Moreover, there was absolutely no vaccine. And relatively few had the chance to develop natural immunity.

It’s true that the vaccine rollout took some time to complete (partly because, again, it was a novel challenge), and that once it was widely available, many Americans refused to be jabbed. But according to this source, by July 30, half of the population was fully vaccinated, and by year-end, this level had hit 62 percent.

Biden supporters can point to the fact that. in fall, 2021, the seven-day daily average of CCP Virus-attributable deaths peaked at 2,093 (on September 22). That was 37.47 percent below the peak under Trump (a seven-day average of 3,347 on January 17, 2021). (These figures come from the Washington Post‘s Covid tracker feature.) But again, there was no vaccine available at all in fall, 2021, under Trump. And natural immunity was much more widespread during President Biden’s first year.

Of course, deaths aren’t the only metric needed to evaluate the effectiveness of CCP Virus responses. Hospitalizations are important, too. A flood of severe virus victims can strain the healthcare system to the breaking point, both making each of them harder to treat effectively, and leaving fewer personnel and resources available for dealing with other serious medical problems.

So it’s more than a little interesting to observe that, according to the Post‘s virus tracker, the peak of reported Covid-related hospital admissions under Trump came on January 6, 2021, at 139,752. During President Biden’s first year, it was 101,865 on December 31, 2021. That’s 27.11 percent fewer. But again, the Trump peak came during a vaccine-less period. Moreover, that Trump peak was the peak for that winter’s wave. That Biden peak wouldn’t arrive until January 19, 2022, when reported hospitalizations hit 161,789 – 15.77 percent higher than the worst Trump figure. And these Biden-era hospitalizations reached such levels even though this was the time when the virus’ Omicron variant became dominant in the United States – strain that was the most infectious, yet the least severe, yet.

But the conclusion that’s been left in place is that, whoever the President, the United States’ virus response has been much less effective than that of many other countries in terms of saving lives.

As of today, the Worldometers.info website reports that the CCP Virus has killed just under 6.69 million globally. The death toll in the United States: Just under 1.12 million. So the United States has suffered 16.74 percent of the world’s virus-related deaths even though it represents just 4.25 percent of the world’s population. That’s a discrepancy so big that it can’t possibly be explained to any meaningful extent by national differences in how virus-related deaths are defined.

A new U.S. Congress convenes next month, and supposedly lots of investigations will be launched – especially by the new Republican majority in the House. Let’s hope that a serious probe of the nation’s clearly bipartisan failure to cope adequately with the CCP Virus is at or near the top of the list.  

Im-Politic: Should an Assault Weapons Ban Really be Biden’s Gun Violence Priority?

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assault weapons, Associated Press, Biden, gun control, gun violence, guns, Im-Politic, Washington Post

On the one hand, it’s easy to understand why, as the Associated Press just put it, “When President Joe Biden speaks about the ‘scourge’ of gun violence, his go-to answer is to zero in on so-called assault weapons.”

After all, a ban on these arms is a much more limited goal than most other gun control proposals. Therefore, in theory, it should be much easier to get Congress behind than broader measures. Indeed, such a ban was in effect from 1995 to 2004. And – again in theory – because assault weapons (however they’re defined) are such efficient killing machines, banning them should be an equally efficient way at least to reduce the fatalities caused by firearms.

On the other hand, some evidence has just appeared that an assault weapons ban would be a virtually empty gesture. And strangely, it came in a piece in the Washington Post that recommended the outlawing of these “weapons of war.”

But as author Robert Gebelhoff himself acknowledged, “mass shootings account for a small fraction of gun deaths, so any ban on these weapons and magazines would result in marginal improvements, at best….” Further, he reports, the best scholarly research shows that the previous ban played an “inconclusive” role in the dip in mass shooting casualties that did take place during those years.

And in what looks like a clincher, despite Gebelhoff’s claim that “banning so-called assault weapons was never meant to reduce overall gun deaths. It was meant to make America’s frustratingly common mass shootings less deadly,” his article reveals that even that contention looks weak.

That conclusion clearly stems from this graph he presents.

 

It didn’t reproduce here as completely as I’d like, but it’s titled “Three Decades of Mass Shooting Victims,” the first year on the far left is 1982, the last one on the far right is this year, the shaded area depicts the ban years, the dark bars are numbers of fatalities, and the lighter bars are numbers of wounded.

What you see is that mass shooting deaths this year so far have indeed been higher than they tended to be during the ban years. But the overall U.S. population is, too – by a little more than 15 percent. So has the problem even gotten worse at all?

Moreover, these deaths (and wounded) are way down from their peak in 2017 – when they were driven way up by the appalling Las Vegas nightclub shooting. And they’ve been falling considerably and consistently (except for the peak CCP Virus year 2020) even though the assault weapons legal regime hasn’t changed one iota.

I can’t be too harsh on Mr. Biden for wanting to “do something” about gun violence in the United States. Everyone of good will does. But he’s the President. So maybe he could show some leadership by identifying “something” that would actually make a meaningful difference.

Glad I Didn’t Say That! The Latest Mainstream Media Misinformation on Manufacturing

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Catherine Rampell, Glad I Didn't Say That!, Jobs, Mainstream Media, manufacturing, manufacturing production, productivity, Washington Post

“Contrary to myths that we’ve stopped ‘making’ things in the United States, we already manufacture a lot of stuff here. In fact, we manufacture nearly the most ‘stuff’ on record, as measured by the inflation-adjusted value of those products. We just happen to make that stuff with fewer workers than we used to, because technological advances have led to huge productivity gains.”

– Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post, September 8, 2022

U.S. manufacturing labor productivity since peak*: +4.00%

U.S. manufacturing employment since then: -7.18%

U.S. after-inflation manufacturing production since then: -3.58%

*December, 2007

(Sources: “The myth of the manufacturing comeback,” by Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post, September 8, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/08/biden-manufacturing-made-america/; “Labor productivity (output per hour),” Series Id: PRS 30006093, Major Sector Productivity and Costs, Databases, Tables & Calculators by Subject, Data Tools, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet; “All employees, thousands, manufacturing, seasonally adjusted,” Series Id: CES3000000001, Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National), Ibid.; & “Industrial Production, Seasonally Adjusted,” Data for Tables 1, 2, and 10 (to July 2022), Industrial Production: Market, Industry Groups, and Individual Series, Historical Data: Tables 1, 2, and 10, Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization – G.17, Data, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System,https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/ipdisk/ip_sa.txt)

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Deaf Leading the Blind on U.S. China Policy

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Barack Obama, Biden, Blob, China, Donald Trump, Fareed Zakaria, George W. Bush, globalism, Mainstream Media, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, privacy, South China Sea, Taiwan, technology, Washington Post

Is “beyond clueless” or “beyond intellectually dishonest” the best way to describe Fareed Zakaria’s latest column for the Washington Post? It’s tough to tell. And you could ask the same of the editors at the Post‘s opinion pages, who clearly saw nothing wrong with letting this apologia for the United States’ thoroughly discredited (at least for those blessed with working and/or uncorrupted brains) pre-Trump China policies see the light of day.

Zakaria’s missive, from this past Thursday, suffers two glaringly obvious flaws. First, like America’s most influential leaders from both parties for decades before 2017 the author insists on the importance of Washington building and maintaining “a serious working relationship” with a regime that has developed (with oceans of reckless American assistance) into one of the world’s “two most powerful actors.”

And former President Donald Trump’s greatest sin (which Zakaria accuses President Biden of following)? Adopting a policy toward Beijing of “open hostility and criticism” that has caused the “collapse” of “communications channels for managing tensions,” and especially during crises or near crises such as that which appears to be developing over Taiwan.

But nothing could be clearer by now than the delusional nature of these procedure-obsessed and substance-free views (which of course despite Zakaria’s claim have continually been parroted by the Biden administration.) For by now it should go without saying that China’s top priority isn’t avoiding conflict with the United States. In particular, it lacks any interest in the President’s oft-stated  objective of creating clear “guard rails” and other rules of the road that result in a safe and orderly “competition” for goals like “winning the twenty-first century” whose definition seems just as vapid, utopian – and distracting – as his administration’s “liberal global order” references.

Instead, China’s top priority is specific and concrete: increasing its power (in all dimensions) and reducing America’s in every way possible. The reason? Eliminate the greatest obstacle to its plans to ensure its decisive control over every major trend shaping the globe’s future – whether the field is military prowess or technological advance or wealth creation or the evolution of society and culture (especially through privacy-threatening progress in cyber-hacking and facial recognition technology).

Not that the Chinese are eager for conflict or even any kind of frontal challenge or showdown – especially when prevailing is still anything but guaranteed. But the ultimate objective is prevailing, and the means entail building the domestic, regional, and global conditions needed to prevail, either without firing a shot or when clashes do break out.

And not that American leaders shouldn’t make sure to maintain those communication lines with Beijing. With both countries possessing vast nuclear arsenals, lowering the odds of accidental conflict is clearly imperative.

But communication, much less broader engagement, mustn’t become an end in and of itself. History too often has shown that they encourage the (1) U.S. acceptance of empty promises; (2) rationalization of failure to achieve or preserve particular valued objectives in the here and now for the sake of payoffs stemming from a sense of mutual obligation that could be entirely unilateral and imaginary, over a time frame that tends to keep lengthening; and (3) the substitution of wishful thinking about attainable goals for gaining and maintaining the ability to deter or successfully counter specific, dangerous Chinese initiatives.

The second glaringly obvious flaw in Zakaria’s column is its exclusive reliance on former Obama administration officials to support his analysis – which makes as much as sense as citing former Carter administration officials as inflation-fighting experts.

After all, it was under Trump’s immediate predecessor that the Chinese began running wild throughout the South China Sea, pushing aggressive territorial claims and literally building islands with military facilities capable of controlling those commercially vital waters – and according to one senior U.S. admiral at the time, precisely because Beijing concluded that Obama would keep sitting on his hands.

It was also Obama who continued enabling China to pursue the predatory economic policies that badly damaged numerous manufacturing industries vital to American national security, and who turned a blind eye to the massive transfer by U.S. and foreign companies of advanced, defense-related techology to the People’s Republic.

But at least Obama “upgraded” the George W. Bush-era “Senior Dialogue” and “Strategic Economic Dialogue” in order to merge “the economic and security tracks” to “break down the barriers inside both the U.S. and Chinese governments to more effectively tackle cross-cutting issues such as climate change, development, and energy security.” Which accomplished exactly what to advance and defend American interests?

And this is where Zakaria’s editors at the Post come in. Evidently none of them thought to say something like, “Hey, Fareed. Maybe quote someone on China policy whose advice isn’t widely seen as a proven failure?”

Maybe they’re just supposed to look for stray commas and dangling participles?  I suspect that the real reason is that they’re part of the same group-thinking, self-perpetuating globalist Blob that keeps working overtime to ensure that the American public is never exposed to any genuinely fresh ideas about promoting the United States’ security, prosperity, and optimal place in the world – and whose  decades-long record of squandering the nation’s blood and treasure on behalf of one grandiose goal after another is its only claim to success.

Im-Politic: A Study of Immigration Economics that Ignores the Economy

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Breitbart.com, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, income, inequality, Leah Boustan, middle class, Neil Munro, Raj Chetty, Ran Abramiztsky, social mobility, The New York Times, Washington Post, welfare

Well, there goes one of the main arguments against more permissive U.S. immigration policies right down the tubes, according to both the Washington Post and New York Times. This month, both have run major articles spotlighting new scholarly findings claiming to show that today’s immigrants rise up the national income ladder just as fast as the tides of newcomers to American shores in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

So far from saddling the country with huge numbers of extra residents overwhelmingly likely to stay as poor, and burdensome to society on net as when they first arrive, encouraging more immigration will greatly enlarge America’s pool of success stories and greatly enrich the nation.

Or will they? The trouble is, the more you think about the new data and the conclusions flowing so freely from it, the more unanswered crucial questions appear. I’ll base this analysis mainly on the Post piece, which provides more statistics comparing the economic records of those two great immigration cohorts.

The economists making the case that recent immigrants are no likelier to become a permanent underclass than their forebears are Ran Abramitzky of Stanford University and Leah Boustan of Princeton University. Their conclusion is based on statistics they claim show that men born into poor immigrant families in specific years of the “Ellis Island era” (1880 and 1910) caught up to the rest of the country income-wise at just about the same pace as the men (and women) born into poor immigrant families in 1997.

For both the Ellis Island immigrants and their latter-day counterparts, the measure of economic success is the earnings of these second generation immigrant men between the ages of 30 and 50, and how they’ve supposedly risen.

But these scholars appear to completely overlook numerous sea changes in the U.S. economy between 1880 and 2015 that obviously have had decisive effects on the income growth performance of immigrant cohorts that have arrived at different points during this 135-year stretch.

For example, more recent immigrants have clearly benefited from various state and national welfare programs that either were completely unavailable to previous such groups, or existed only in the most rudimentary forms. Since cash benefits are counted by the Census Bureau as income, and given the evidence that immigrants are heavy welfare users compared with the rest of the population, the discrepancy surely distorts the Abramitzky-Boustan comparisons in favor of those more recent immigrants.

Nor do the two scholars seem to take into account the dramatic slowing of income mobility between the late-19^th and early 21^st centuries. And much evidence shows that it”s been considerable. For example, this widely cited study concludes that “The United States had more relative occupational mobility [which generated upward income mobility] generations through the 1900–1920…than the United States in the second half of the twentieth century.”

And these conclusions have been reenforced for the late 20th century and extended into the 21st by a team of economists headed by Harvard University’s As summarized in the first graph in this different New York Times article, the percentage of all U.S. children (including those from immigant families) born into the average American household with a chance of earning more than their parents fell by about half between 1940 and 1980.

Additionally, the Chetty team – whose work is viewed by many as the latest gold standard in the field – discovered that lower-income Americans (also including immigrant families) have by no means escaped this pattern.

In other words, the move by the children of low-income immigrant cohorts to the 65th U.S. income percentile – the Abramitzky-Boustan measure of income ladder-climbing – isn’t nearly what it used to be. (For some perspective, the 50th percentile is something of a proxy for “middle-class incomes.”)  

And further reenforcing the idea that individuals’ ladder-climbing nowadays doesn’t yield nearly the economic stability and security affects as in the past are two other widely noted trends marking the U.S. economy and workforce in recent decades: a major widening of income inequality, and the growing inability of single-earner households to live middle-class lives.

In other words, two economists from leading universities have evidently conducted research about a major U.S. economic issue that ignores much of what’s been happening to the U.S. economy during the period they examine. And at least two leading newspapers have uncritically swallowed their findings. It’s clear that climbing into the middle class isn’t the only feature of American life that isn’t nearly what it used to be. 

P.S. For work raising different, generally broader questions about these and other immigration-related findings by Boustan in particular, see this piece by Breitbart.com‘s Neil Munro. 

 

 

Im-Politic: A Mainstream Media Award for Spreading Immigration Misinformation

Tags

Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden, Biden administration, Border Patrol, Department of Homeland Security, Evans Bishop, Haitians, Herblock, Im-Politic, Immigration, Lalo Alcaraz, Library of Congress, Michael Cavna, migrants, misinformation, Texas National Guard, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, Washington Post

The American Mainstream Media complex has already established the practice of not rescinding major journalism awards it’s handed out for stories that seemed plausible when published or broadcast, but have since been debunked. So I wasn’t surprised to find out yesterday that this national news establishment has taken its biases and its contempt for accuracy to the next level.

But I was disgusted nonetheless – and you should be, too – by the honoring of a political cartoonist whose work was exposed as fraudulent by the time the decision was made. Even worse, the U.S. Library of Congress, a part of the federal government that you and I pay for, has lent its name to this outrage.

The latest recipient of the Herblock Prize (named after the late, famed Washington Post editorial cartoonist) is Lalo Alcaraz, and it’s certainly noteworthy, as reported in the Post, that he’s the first Latino to win.

The problem, however, which was overlooked by the Herb Block Foundation, the Library, Post reporter Michael Cavna, and apparently every single one of his editors, is that Alcaraz has purveyed the falsehood that last year, U.S. Border Patrol agents used whips against migrants from Haiti trying to enter the country illegally. In fact, as shown in the article, he insinuated that such brutality has long been Standard Operating Procedure by the Border Patrol. (For some reason, I couldn’t manage to reproduce an image of the drawing here.)   

When it came out, it was plausible that this incident deserved investigation. After all, even President Biden declared, “I promise you, those people will pay.”

Almost immediately, however the claims of whipping began falling apart. The photographer who took the pictures in question declared that “I didn’t ever see [any agents] whip anybody, with the thing. [The agent he photographed] was swinging it. But I didn’t see him actually take — whip someone with it. That’s something that can be misconstrued when you’re looking at the picture.”

In fact, it quickly turned out that what were described as whips were really split reins. Even Open Borders-happy Alejandro Mayorkas, the Biden administration Secretary of Homeland Security, stated that these reins were being used to ensure control of the horses – before following up by claiming that the pictures “horrified him.”

Late last month, a representative of the Border Patrol agents’ labor union told the New York Post that the accused officers had been cleared of criminal wrongdoing, though the Customs and Border Patrol agency of the Homeland Security department is still conducting an “administrative investigation” that could still cost them their jobs. And in early April, a group of Republican Senators, noting that more than six months had passed for a probe that Mayorkas had promised would be “completed in days, if not weeks,” pressed the administration to release the findings. Yet they still remain secret.

None of this wealth of exculpatory information, however, seems to have impressed Alcaraz – much less persuaded him to apologize for spreading such misinformation. And why should he, when mainstream news organizations like the Washington Post actually continue codding his treatment of the controversy. Indeed, here’s how reporter Cavna described the award-winner’s drawing: “In one work, he drew a rope-wielding member of the U.S. Border Patrol on horseback in the style of an antique engraving — visually evoking last year’s viral photo of an agent trying to stop a Haitian migrant in Texas.”

Alcaraz is lucky in one respect though – he has a chance to make amends. As widely reported, late last week, a Texas National Guard member Evans Bishop drowned in the Rio Grande River while trying to save a migrant struggling to swim across. The Guard isn’t the Border Patrol, but it’s carrying out the same border security mission. How fitting if Alcaraz drew a tribute to his selflessness.  And how seemingly unlikely.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Pro-Immigration Labor Shortage Claims Keep Going Up as Real Wages Keep Going Down

Tags

compensation, Employment Cost Index, immigrants, Immigration, inflation, inflation-adjusted wages, Labor Department, labor shortage, productivity, wages, Washington Post, workers, {What's Left of) Our Economy

It’s as if the Open Borders Lobby – both its conservative and liberal wings – has recently decided that it’s really had enough of labor market tightness that’s due to reduced immigration, and that’s also giving so many of America’s workers a long-needed pay raise. So it’s been re-upping the pressure to open the floodgates once again and solve this terrible problem. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.)

As is so often the case, the Open Borders-happy Washington Post editorial board has made the case most succinctly: “[C]ompanies are frantically trying to hire enough workers to keep up with the surge in demand for everything from waffle irons to cars. The nation has more than 11 million job openings and 6 million unemployed.

“This imbalance is giving workers and job seekers tremendous power. Pay is rising at the fastest pace in years….”

Yet this claim is not only profoundly anti-American worker. It’s completely false – at least if you look at the only measures of pay that reveal anything about whether employees are getting ahead or not. And they’re of course the compensation measures adjusted for inflation.

What do they show? Between 2020 and 2021, inflation-adjusted hourly pay for all U.S. workers in the private sector were down by 2.10 percent and for blue-collar workers by 1.52 percent. (As known by RealityChek regulars, the U.S. Labor Department that tracks pay trends for the federal government doesn’t monitor any type of compensation for public sector workers because their wages and salaries and benefits are determined largely by politicians’ decisions, not the forces of supply and demand. As a result, they’re thought to say little about the labor market’s true strengths or weaknesses.)

Do you know when such wages have fallen by that much? Try “never” for the entire workforce (where the Labor Department data go back to 2006), and for blue collar workers, several times during the 1970s, which were a terrible time for the economy overall. (For this group, the official numbers go back to 1964).

But haven’t better benefits compensated? Two Labor Department data sets do measure changes in all forms of compensation. The best known, and the one most closely followed by the Federal Reserve and leading economists everywhere, is the Employment Cost Index (ECI). It covers state and local government (though not federal) employees as well as private sector workers. But there’s no evidence of any inflation-adjusted gains for the nation’s workforce – much less outsized gains – from these statistics either.

From the fourth quarter of 2020 to the fourth quarter of 2021, this index did increase by 4.37 percent for all covered workers (breakouts for white- and blue-collar employees only go up to 2006). Yet during this period, the Labor Department’s inflation measure, the Consumer Price Index, was up 7.42 percent. That’s called “falling behind” in my book.

When business (and government on the state and local levels) starts offering pay that’s rising higher than the inflation rate, then Americans as a whole can start worrying about genuine labor shortages. (And even then, as I’ve written, it would be much better for the economy as a whole if companies responded by boosting their productivity, rather than by agitating for more mass immigation with the aim of driving wages down and of course dodging any incentives to operate more efficiently.) For now, though, it’s obvious that what U.S. business is “frantic” about (to use the Post‘s term) isn’t a shortage of workers. It’s a shortage of cheap workers.

Im-Politic: The Washington Post’s Phony Probe of Policing Abuses

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crime, Im-Politic, journalism, law enforcement, Mainstream Media, police misconduct, police reform, policing, statistics, Vera Institute of Justice, Washington Post

As RealityChek readers surely know by now, reporting information out of context is one of my biggest gripes about journalism these days. (See, e.g., here.) So if there hadn’t been so much important news coming out of the Ukraine war and on so many other fronts this week, I’d have already written about an especially egregious example that appeared in the Washington Post this past Thursday.

Its big “exclusive” finding? “The Post collected data on nearly 40,000 payments [to resolve police misconduct claims] at 25 of the nation’s largest police and sheriff’s departments within the past decade, documenting more than $3.2 billion spent to settle claims.”

Sounds like a bundle right? Even a criminally large amount of money. In isolation, of course. But information never exists in isolation. And any reporter or anyone else with a working brain or a lick of integrity would have tried to answer these two questions: How does this sum compare with the nation’s total policing budget over the same period? And how does it compare with the national cost of crime?

None of this background appeared in the Post piece. But it took me a grand total of thirtyseconds of searching on-line to find answers from reliable sources.

The national law cost of policing? That’s $115 billion per year, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, whose declared mission is ending “the overcriminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants, and people experiencing poverty.”

That is, the organization isn’t exactly an apologist for current policing performance. But it’s telling us that over ten years, the cost of settling police misconduct claims equalled 0.28 percent of America’s policing budget (of $1.15 trillion). Any decent person would like to see that number fall to zero percent, but 0.28 is pretty close. And it’s even better considering that, as at least Post reporters Keith Alexander, Steven Rich, and Hannah Thacker (along with their editors) had the honesty to observe (in the middle of this long article) that

“City officials and attorneys representing the police departments said settling claims is often more cost-efficient than fighting them in court. And settlements rarely involve an admission or finding of wrongdoing.”

The authors also state that their figures exclude payments of less than $1,000. Let’s suppose, however, that including these incidents doubles the total amount of payouts over the last decade. Then they’d represent 0.56 percent of the national policing budget. That’s still awfully close to zero for a line of work whose employees lay their lives on the line every day, and who constantly need to make split-second life-and-death decisions.

It’s of course certain that the number of police misconduct charges that produced payouts, whether they stemmed from genuine abuses or not, doesn’t include all cases of misconduct because so many undoubtedly aren’t reported. But even if all of them were, and consequently the total cost of misconduct got doubled, its share of total U.S. policing spending over the last decade would barely top one percent. So forgive me if I’m not overcome with outrage.

As for the second question, in February, 2021, a team of academics and policy analysts estimated that in the 2017, crime cost the U.S. economy $2.6 trillion. That single year number is more than 8oo times bigger than the Post‘s figure for the last ten years’ worth of costs for police misconduct payouts.

As a result, these police misconduct costs as a percentage of the costs of crime to America over a year – much less a decade – don’t even represent the proverbial “drop in the bucket.” They’re more like an aerosol particle in the bucket.

The researchers who came up with the cost-of-crime figure acknowledge that limitations on the available data for crime forced them to include modeling techniques in their calculations, and that more work (and more actual information) should be performed to produce greater accuracy. But even if the $2.6 trillion overestimates the national cost of crime by half, it would still render the police misconduct payouts total utterly trivial in comparison.

Policing abuses definitely need to be reduced dramatically. But how about setting the same goal for the kinds of rampant journalistic abuses most recently epitomized by this Washington Post investigation?

Im-Politic: Despite Omicron, Progress Against the Virus So Far Has Continued

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CCP Virus, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, hospitalization, Im-Politic, mortality, Omicron variant, Washington Post

I wasn’t planning on writing on CCP Virus-related issues today in part because I just posted on them on Saturday. But given today’s stock market rout (so far) and the recent instances of virus-related disruption of sports, education, and business due to fears about the highly contagious Omicron variant, it seems worthwhile to present the latest data on the virus’ ongoing impact on public health so far.

And the big takeaway so far is that despite Omicron’s arrival in the United States and the continuation of the Delta variant’s dominance of reported domestic virus cases, the damage to Americans’ health as best as can be measured has continued a persistent decline.

Although these conclusions need to be seen as very preliminary, they deserve attention for several reasons, especially considering the magnitude of the policy response so far. First, although Omicron was probably present in America well before the first case was confirmed on December 1, it’s now nearly three weeks after that apparent initial infection. So the new variant has been here for a while. Second, the also-highly infectious Delta variant still accounts for fully 97 percent of all reported cases across the country as of yesterday, although certain regions (like the New York City metropolitan area), have recorded a much greater Omicron presence.

Third, it’s getting to be winter throughout the United States. So any new variant that came state-side was inevitably going to pack quite an infection punch simply because respiratory viruses tend to spread faster in cold weather, and mainly because more of us spend more time in indoor spaces with less-than-super-ventilation.

So given all that, here’s what’s been happening since December 1 with the two indicators that tell us the most about the public health impact – hospitalizations and deaths (although, because of reporting methodology problems described here, neither is great):

First, new hospitalization admissions, as measured by daily changes in the seven-day averages (7DAs), which smooth out the random fluctuations that always pop up over shorter periods. And I’ve switched over to getting them straight from the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) rather than taking them from the Washington Post‘s virus tracker – which also draws from the CDC, and remains very good, but which doesn’t seem to transfer hospitalization information from the agency consistently enough.

On December 1, when the first Omicron case was detected, the 7DA average of these admissions was rising at a five percent rate. By December 4, this rate of increase had hit 16 percent, and stayed in that neighborhood through the ninth. But it was back to the single digits three days later, and has fallen steadily since. As of last Friday, moreover, the 7DA had actually fallen by two percent. So if anything, it looks like the strain on hospitals, has been easing most recently overall in the nation.

The trends in the 7DAs in the daily death counts have been much more volatile, but considerable improvement can be seen here, too. (And these figures come from the Post tracker.)

As of December 1, the 7DA of these counts was down by nearly 22 percent. But it shot up to just over 42 percent on December 3, and stayed above 40 percent through the seventh.

But a dramatic drop-off began right afterwards. On December 8, the 7DA sank all the way down to abut 13.5 percent. The following day, 3.3 percent. And on the tenth, it declined by nearly seven percent. Moreover, this rate kept falling through the fourteenth – and by double-digits on two of those days.

On the fifteenth, it jumped back into positive territory (nearly 7.5 percent), but as of last Friday was back down to a little more than 4.5 percent. (For the record, we have numbers for Saturday, the eighteenth and yesterday, and they were about five and four percent, respectively, but reporting for weekends can be pretty spotty, so don’t make too much of them.)

In other words, American deaths associated with the CCP Virus are still taking place every single day – and in big numbers. On December 1, that day’s count was 2,678. Last Friday, it was 2,099. But that’s down nearly 22 percent. Measured in terms of the more reliable 7DA, they’re up from 1,048 to 1,291 – up more than 23 percent.

But what’s most important – and the most that can realistically be hoped for – is that the rate of increase slows. If these somewhat encouraging trends hold, let’s hope that the Biden administration and other public health authorities recognize that this is what the 7DA data have been showing both on the mortality and hospitalization fronts.