Housing has bottomed

With the release of new home sales this morning, and existing home sales yesterday, it is increasingly apparent that housing has bottomed – just as I said a number of months ago that it would sometime this spring.

To the graphs! New home sales (blue in the graph below) bottomed last October, at 557,000 units annualized. As of June, they were at 646,000:

This isn’t as good as earlier this spring, but is better than every other reading in the past 12 months. Meanwhile prices, which typically lag sales, bounced back from May’s 12 month low, but it is not clear at all if the trend is reversing yet.

Repeat Message to the Mainstream Media: Stop Serving as Trump’s Propaganda Machine

Donald Trump addressed a rightwing crowd (Turning Point USA) in Washington on Tuesday. The audience roared in support of the president standing in front of the Presidential Seal. Now take a close look at the seal. It had been doctored to include a two-headed eagle – the same as the Russian seal and in place of arrows in one of the eagle’ talons – there was golf clubs.

Click on the image for better detail.

by New Deal democrat

My forecast for the rest of 2019 is . . . .

https://twitter.com/pbump/status/1154042744702029824?s=20

Also the MSM noticed. Bump is a Washington Post reporter.

The point is that this implies that Mueller thinks Trump was guilty and that he would have a reasonable chance of convincing a jury that there is proof beyond reasonable doubt of Trump’s guilt.

The other answer was “that was a sufficient reason to not indict Trump which doesn’t imply that it was a necessary condition. As written in the report I don’t think it is fair to discuss the question of

update: in the afternoon, Mueller took it back

When he appeared before the Intelligence Committee in the afternoon, Mueller clarified this exchange, noting that it was not solely because of the Office of Legal Counsel opinion that he did not charge Trump with a crime. Instead, he said, “we did not reach a determination as to whether the president committed a crime.”

This is inconsistent with his exchange with Liu. The key word is “the” in “the reason”. Liu asserted that there was only one reason and Mueller agreed. But in any case, the bottom line is that he took it back.

Everyone is waiting for tomorrow to see what Mueller will tell the House. I am going to say it will be nothing other than what has already been said verbally. No one is going to read the text version and see what was really said by Mueller. Only a few of us will and I have yet to find a place to place it in my bathroom.

In Michigan in May, Congressional Representative Justin Amash had a townhall in his district to explain why he called for the impeachment of DTrump. He did not call it to first explain why he supported Trump or to say I was mistaken in giving him my support since he took office. He absolved himself of the responsibility of doing so and he marched to the same tune as the rest of the House Republicans. Instead Justin arrived at his support of the impeachment of Trump after reading the 448 page Mueller report.

Setting politics aside many of us already knew Trump was not fit for office based upon his past, his actions, and his lies. We saw through Trump and recognized what he was. After reading Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice by the president, Congressman Justin Amash finally saw the light.

As the Atlantic explains, one person in the crowd just found out.

“As far as she was aware, Trump had been totally exonerated.

Cathy Garnaat, ‘I was surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump. I hadn’t heard that before. (A Republican who supported Amash and Trump, told NBC that night.) ‘I’ve mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn’t heard anything negative about that report, and President Trump has been exonerated.'”

I am not sure what Congressman Justin Amash’s excuse was for not knowing Trump was not fit (being kind here) for office. He could not see it himself and he marched right along with the rest of them until he was told by someone else Trump was unfit.

Tomorrow morning when Mueller is scheduled to testify publicly before the House Judiciary Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, Ms. Garnaat’s words will be worth considering as they represent a purposeful perception gap by the public. A tidy summary of how Americans may have navigated the time gap successfully between the 4-page Barr commentary on the Mueller report and the report itself. Her short statement underscores how successful Attorney General William Barr exploited the space of time between his release of the 448 page report as compared to his 4-page short brief of what the Mueller report said, harnessing the power of television to set his version of the narrative of the report, and knowing most people were unlikely to read it themselves and have that “aah huh” moment. Why read the book when one can read the cliff-notes? There is no test of citizenry knowledge of current events to be passed here.

The challenge faced by Democrats tomorrow’s attempt is to make Mueller’s words resonate more forcefully then Barr’s 4-page summary in an era defined by the brevity of the laws of entertainment. Mueller’s testimony if it does call out Trump may have missed the moment. Of course many of us claim, the moon landing was done in a Hollywood studio. Perhaps, I will be mistaken and much more will come out of this?

As far as Amash, he is saving his ass and he should have known better well before Mueller’s report.

Bill Barr Already Won The Atlantic, Elaina Plott, July 23, 2019

We use large-scale federal survey data linked to administrative death records to investigate the relationship between Medicaid enrollment and mortality. Our analysis compares changes in mortality for near-elderly adults in states with and without Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansions. We identify adults most likely to benefit using survey information on socioeconomic and citizenship status, and public program participation.

We find a 0.13 percentage point decline in annual mortality, a 9.3 percent reduction over the sample mean, associated with Medicaid expansion for this population. The effect is driven by a reduction in disease-related deaths and grows over time. We find no evidence of differential pre-treatment trends in outcomes and no effects among placebo groups.

Sarah Miller Sean Altekruse Norman Johnson Laura R. Wherry, NBER WP Working Paper 26081

I’ve been waiting for this. ACA Medicaid expansion is a policy experiment. The states which did not expand Medicaid made it easy to see if Medicaid saves lives. Obviously it does.

Via Axios where Sam Baker wrote; “expansion states saw a mortality rate that’s about 0.2% lower than nonexpansion states, the authors write — which would translate to roughly 15,600 lives, had the expansion not been optional for states.”

So Republican reactionary idiots have killed roughly 15,600 people so far through refusal to expand Medicaid alone. For comparison “In 2017, the estimated number of murders in the nation was 17,284” (just a number for comparison, I am not saying Republican legislators are murderers).

I don’t read Axios. I clicked there from Steve Benen

Is Michael Gerson. My dad likes David Brooks (please no comments on this). I don’t, but also I am quite sure that Brooks isn’t really a conservative anymore. I think he just plays one on TV. He has a column in the New York Times based on their affirmative action conservative quota. There would be no reason to pay any attention to him if he weren’t a relatively reasonable conservative. I think he is, in fact, a remarkably vacuous centrist. It may however be that his penchant for extreme abstraction to the point of vagueness rapidly approach perfect meaninglessness is not the result of an inability to understand which collections of words mean something and which mean nothing. I suspect it is his way of dealing with his recognition of the fact that actually existing conservatism is indefensible. So ring the non changes on the Burkean alarm bells.

I think Gerson is clearly sincere. I think his policy proposals are motivated by strong Christian faith. Oddly for a conservative Christian, his version of Christian principles strikes this atheist as closely related to the example and teachings of Jesus Christ.

He has admitted that he played a major role in convincing Bush to fight AIDS with PEPFAR. He and Bush have saved hundreds of thousands (or millions) of lives (notably with the assistance of outstanding charities including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Clinton Family Foundation which is recognized by independent experts as one of the best and extraordinarily transparent too (hmm maybe Bill Clinton is my favorite conservative)).

He also made an eloquent case for promoting Democracy in Iraq, noting that the claim that they were incapable of it was racist. Now he naively imagined that if he could get Bush to say the words, he could get Bush to pay some attention to them, but they were impressive words.

Finally I like his Washington Post columns including this one. His claims are to avoid Trump considering one to be an enemy one has to act as a servant and defend his actions, and that this requires abandoning “morality or rationality or both.” Quite so and definitely worth writing although sensible people know this already.

However, I am puzzled by the two examples he cites. One is Liz Cheney who, he claims, is not prominent because of her name but because of her political skills. Of course Rep. Cheney defends her father Dick Cheney, so she has abandoned both morality and rationality long ago. I don’t understand how Gerson won’t accept Trump telling us born congresswomen to go back to their own country, but was willing to work with monstrous criminal torturers. Trump has committed many crimes, but I am not sure he has committed any nearly as appalling as the crimes Gerson downplayed in his previous job. I don’t understand how he managed it (and won’t get a change to ask him and he wouldn’t answer if I did).

His other example of someone who was damaged by Trump is Paul Ryan. He wrote

Former House speaker Paul D. Ryan’s reputation, for example, was deeply damaged by his service under Trump. Ryan — whatever his intentions — sent a message that the wealth of the country is a “real” issue, while the character of the country is a sideshow. But what brand of conservatism would elevate wealth above rectitude, decency and concern for the common good?

Every actually existing brand of course. I think Gerson uses “conservatism” to mean “good” and contrasts it with an entirely imaginary alternative. As an economist I am disturbed that he almost concedes that Ryan focused on the wealth of the country. In fact, Ryan focuses on Randian ideology. I suspect he supports tax cuts as a matter of principle no matter what the effects. Before Trump was elected, he demonstrated an extraordinary willingness to lie and to lie without shame. In any case, I think someone who really cared about the wealth of the country would look at the evidence. Basically his approach to policy was to lie about what he proposed. I’d say that his reputation should not have been damaged at all by his service under Trump, because I think he had already earned a reputation for complete indifference to the truth displaying an absolute absense of decency.

Now I have a prediction. I think Gerson will continue to call himself a conservative (unlike say original supply sider Bruce Bartlett). He is clearly a man of faith and, I think, he can keep his faith that his values are true conservatism and the fact that almost no powerful conservative shares them is as irrelevant as is the argument that horrible natural disasters suggest that God is not benevolent, not omnipotent and probably nonexistant.

How today’s Democratic ‘Squad’ is a direct ideological descendant of the original 1850s Republicans

Nothing is ever really “new.” Today’s ‘Squad’ of young Democrats is the direct ideological descendant of the original 1850s Congressional Republicans. That is one of the important lessons of Joanne Freeman’s “The Fields of Blood,” about the increasing threats of, and actual incidents of, violence in the US Congress between the 1830s and the Civil War.

Just as today, there were differing economic and social divides in America. Economically there was a struggle for power between the merchant class and farmers. Socially the increasingly contentious issue was that of slavery. At least beginning with Andrew Jackson’s 1828 Presidential election victory, the Democratic Party was the voice of farmers. The ex-Federalists and the nascent Whig party became that of commerce.

But there were northern and southern branches of each party, defined in how they stood on slavery. The story of the 1830s through 1850s is how that moral issue moved to the forefront, splitting both parties, and ultimately giving rise to the Republicans. This is very much the same paradigm as the “great sort” that took place between the Democratic Party and the GOP between 1980 and 2016 (if not 2008).

Not only is that, but reminiscent of polls over the past 10 years, in the 1830s and 1840s  northerners, especially northern Whigs, wanted to settle disputes civilly, while especially southern Democrats were willing to threaten, and even use, physical force to get their way.