As is typical at this time of year both the news and opinion pieces are even duller and more repetitive than usual. When most of the local news broadcasts are devoted to the weather in Milwaukee you know things are slow.

Maybe I’ll just start writing posts without a connecting lead-in from the news or opinion sections.

It’s not just that so many people are taking their final summer vacations before school starts—seemingly the entire continent of Europe will be on vacation until next week.

There’s a certain amount of commentary on President Trump’s announced confab with Russian President Putin, much of it focused on how much the author of any given piece dislikes Trump. The one thing I hear no one talking about is a plan for Ukraine to prevail in its war with Russia without demanding that we provide arms we don’t have to Ukraine, Ukraine field troops they don’t have, or we begin World War III.

In her Washington Post column Heather Long takes note of a development in the U. S. economy:

The top 10 percent of earners now drive about half of spending, according to Moody’s, up from 36 percent three decades ago. These people will determine if the U.S. economy avoids a recession. These are households earning $250,000 or more, and they are largely doing just fine, buoyed by strong stock-market gains, mansions and rental properties that have shot up in value in recent years, and a rebound in business dealmaking. The wealthy continue to spend on lavish vacations, parties and events, and that masks the strain that many middle-class and moderate-income families are experiencing.

The “K-shaped” economy is back, where there’s a clear divergence between how the top and the bottom are faring. Businesses understand this. It’s why credit card companies have introduced even more exclusive credit cards this summer with higher fees, all-inclusive resorts are debuting $1,000-a-night experiences, and luxury car brands such as Porsche and Aston Martin have been among the first automakers to raise prices, because their clientele is less likely to push back. Any company that can is trying to go “upmarket” as much as possible in this environment.

I think the implications of this go far beyond the risks of tariffs to consumption on the part of those earning $170,000 per year or more which is the focus of Ms. Long’s column. It means that the upper middle class aren’t saving or investing at the rates they should be. It means that we need a rebalancing of the economy towards greater production and less consumption as I’ve been contending for some time.

It also supports another point I’ve been making for some time: tax policy needs to be more focused than at present. Simply cutting the tax rates of the top 10% of income earners isn’t encouraging them to save or invest as much as needs to be the case. It’s encouraging them to consume.

I don’t know enough about Texas politics, state laws, or its Congressional districts to make an intelligent comment about the plan to redistrict Texas’s Congressional districts. I think that most of what we’re hearing is just political posturing.

As I’ve said before I think that Congressional districts should be compact and within county and municipal boundaries. I would support amending the Constitution to that effect. I don’t believe there is any prospect of that short of a Constitutional convention which would be risky.

I also think that Congress should pass a law prohibiting redistricting other than following a decennial census. It’s my understanding that such a law is making its way through the House.

Just for amusement here’s the Illinois 4th Congressional District:

Its original purpose was to ensure that Chicago would elect a Hispanic representative. Such contortions were deemed necessary following the 1990 census but that’s certainly not the case anymore. I’m not sure what purpose is actually served by it now.

President Trump has raised tariffs on good imported from India to 50%. At CNBC Erin Doherty reports:

The White House announced Wednesday that it is imposing an additional 25% tariff on India, bringing the total levies against the major United States trading partner to 50%.

“I find that the Government of India is currently directly or indirectly importing Russian Federation oil,” President Donald Trump said in an executive order.

“Accordingly, and as consistent with applicable law, articles of India imported into the customs territory of the United States shall be subject to an additional ad valorem rate of duty of 25 percent,” the executive order reads.

The new tariffs are set to go into effect in 21 days, according to the order, while the previously announced 25% tariffs are set to take effect on Thursday.

Trump’s new tariff rate on India is now among the highest levies on any of the United States’ trading partners.

That sounds like he’s serious about striking at the oil revenue that has increased Russian GDP over the last year and provided the funds necessary to continue the war. Whether the new tariff is actually applied or whether it will be effective are different questions.

I’m less concerned than some about such actions driving India farther into the Russian-Chinese orbit. India will remain within the Indian orbit and the Indians recognize that China is a bigger risk for them than the United States.

If Mr. Trump is really serious, he’ll go after India’s services trade with the U. S. which will be more difficult but which dwarfs its goods trade with the U. S.

I know I’ve mentioned this before but I don’t think I’ve mentioned it lately. I used to be a faithful donor to our local public television station but I stopped in protest and have not done so since. Without getting too deeply into the weeds the station sold off an asset and the funds realized by the sale were used for purposes having nothing to do with the station’s mission and everything to do with the ambitions of the people working for the station.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal beat me to the punch:

Some states have tried to hand redistricting to an ostensibly independent commission. Yet then it’s a partisan proxy battle, and commissions that are evenly split can end up deadlocked. Commissions can also tilt one way or another with a gerrymander-like result: See California, with 43 Democratic seats out of 52; or New Jersey, 9 Democrats out of 12.

But there’s an element of mutual assured destruction here, and Democrats don’t want to limit their ability to gerrymander if Republicans aren’t going to quit, and vice versa. That’s why a federal standard might be useful. States run their own voting processes, but Congress has broad power under the Constitution to regulate the “manner” of House elections. One option might be a law telling states they can’t redistrict mid-decade.

One cause of more frequent gerrymanders is judicial intervention in response to partisan lawsuits challenging maps. The Supreme Court has been moving in a helpful direction here. In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the Justices said partisan gerrymandering is a nonjusticiable question for the political branches. A case next term, Louisiana v. Callais, is an opportunity to remove judges from the political thicket of racial gerrymanders.

Congress could also impose substantive restrictions on state map-makers, such as some kind of mathematical test for partisan fairness or district compactness. Such formulas can be gamed, though, and it’s hard to see Republicans and Democrats agreeing on the details. Ditto for bigger reforms, such as expanding the size of the House from the current 435, where it has been stuck since 1913.

But telling states they can only redistrict once per decade might de-escalate the gerrymander wars, and it would mainly ratify the status quo of recent years. Both parties could benefit from this kind of disarmament treaty, and voters most of all.

The Congress has sufficient powers to end that “arms race” under Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution, the “Congress and Elections Clause”. They should do it.

Just for the record I think that Congressional districts should be compact and not cross county and municipal borders to the degree possible. I also think that there should be more Congressional districts (at least twice as many as at present).

I found this sufficiently concerning I wanted to pass it along. It isn’t exactly new news but, since the conflict between Israel and Hamas continues, it’s certainly relevant. A poll was taken of Israeli public opinion back in March by Geocartography Knowledge Group. Shay Hazkani and Tamir Sorek reported on it in Haaretz in May:

A recent survey of Israeli Jews reveals a growing comfort with the idea of forcibly expelling Palestinians – both from Gaza and from within Israel’s borders. The poll also found that a significant minority supports the mass killing of civilians in enemy cities captured by the Israeli army. These disturbing trends reflect the radicalization of religious Zionism since Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, and the failure of secular Israeli Jews to articulate a vision that challenges Jewish supremacy.

Commissioned in March by Pennsylvania State University and conducted by Tamir Sorek for the Israeli polling firm Geocartography Knowledge Group, the survey polled a representative sample of 1,005 Jewish Israelis. It posed a series of “impolite” questions – topics typically avoided in mainstream Israeli polling – about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

According to the results, 82 percent of respondents supported the expulsion of Gaza’s residents, while 56 percent favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel. These figures mark a sharp rise from a 2003 survey, in which support for such expulsions stood at 45 percent and 31 percent, respectively.

IMO we should definitely support Israel’s right to exist and, consequently, its right to defend itself. But that support should not be unconditional.

There are two things of concern in the poll’s results. 82% support for ethnic cleansing of Gaza is bad enough but majority support among Jewish Israelis for expelling “Palestinian citizens of Israel”, i.e. ethnic Arabs who are citizens of Israel, is that much worse. And the situation is deteriorating as the change since 2003 indicates.

I couldn’t help but laugh as I read the Chicago Tribune editorial on the prospect of the State of Illinois assuming control of the Chicago Public Schools:

Chicagoans with long memories can hear echoes of the past in the growing crisis around finances at Chicago Public Schools.

It was just before Christmas in 1979 when CPS, frozen out of debt markets and with state government unwilling to bail the district out after several such rescues in the 1970s, couldn’t pay its workers. Vendors wouldn’t provide services for fear of going unpaid.

In January 1980, Gov. Jim Thompson hammered out a deal with the city, Chicago Teachers Union and CPS to have the state essentially take over financial decision-making for Chicago’s public schools. The state was able to borrow on the schools’ behalf and collected new property taxes to finance the debt. The School Finance Authority, created to oversee CPS’ finances, assumed control of CPS budgets and contracting.

Here’s their bottom line:

A school board and a mayor that jack up teacher salaries and openly talk of taking on more junk-rated debt during a period of deficits well into the hundreds of millions have relinquished their right to determine CPS’ future. There assuredly will be painful conditions attached to whatever assistance the state provides — if indeed a cash-strapped Springfield even summons the will and the means to help. A meaningful, enforceable school consolidation plan, perhaps? Limits on contracting authority maybe, including future negotiations with CTU?

The bottom line: If you can’t manage your own business, you’re in no position to complain when others force concessions from you in return for fixing what you’ve broken.

So much has changed over the last 45 years it’s hard to know where to start. Illinois’s population has grown by 8% even as the U. S. population has grown 45%. Chicago’s population has declined by about 300,000. It’s now lower than it has been in a century.

Jim Thompson was the powerful Republican governor; Jane Byrne was mayor. Now the governor is a Democrat who has been unable to get any of his key proposals enacted into law and the mayor is Brandon Johnson, a former CTU labor organizer. That state’s credit rating was AAA; the city’s A. Now the state’s is A and the city’s roughly junk status. Illinois was considered a highish tax state; now it’s tax burden is arguably the highest in the nation.

Among the things that haven’t changed is that Illinois was considered one of the stingiest states with respect to K-12 funding then and it still is.

What really needs to happen are major changes education and its funding in the State of Illinois, something for which there is little if any prospect for happening.

I thought that Julien Berman’s Washington Post column on the “bleak economic picture emerging from the jobs numbers” was pretty good:

Despite constantly shifting tariff rates that have created enormous uncertainty for businesses, initial readings of the labor market’s health showed it holding strong. Throughout the first half of the year, unemployment remained relatively low and the economy kept adding jobs.

Turns out, this was an illusion.

On Friday, the Labor Department reported that employers added only 73,000 jobs in July — far fewer than the 115,000 forecasters had expected.

More important, the department published sweeping revisions to earlier reports that had made the job market look strong all spring. The estimated number of new jobs in May was lowered to 19,000, from the initial 144,000. June’s numbers fell to just 14,000, from 147,000. Together, these changes amount to an overall decrease in new jobs of almost 90 percent.

What’s worse, three-quarters of the added jobs were in just one sector: health care. Along with the lower numbers, this suggests that America is starting to see the effects of Trump’s tariffs ripple through the economy.

Basically, I think those results were obvious to anyone who had his ear to the ground while the previous results were counterintuitive to say the least. The post includes some nice graphs and charts including one of the number of jobs added monthly since January 2024 and one of the number of jobs added by sector. I had actually started drafting this post before reading this passage which surprised me:

A deeper problem here is that the monthly jobs reports might be getting less reliable. The Labor Department always modifies its estimates as new data comes in, but revisions as large as the one for the spring numbers raise concerns that the government’s statistical infrastructure is starting to buckle. Note that the Bureau of Economic Analysis has lost about 20 percent of its employees since the beginning of the year.

I don’t believe that the explanation he proffers is quite as good as he does. Between 1960 and 1970 the number of employees at the Bureau of Labor Statistics grew by just about 50%, roughly where it’s remained ever since. There is no obvious relationship between the number of BLS staff and BLS data or, indeed, U. S. population since the BLS contracts the actual conducting of surveys out to the Census Bureau which makes sense.

I also agree with him that President Trump acted impetuously in firing the chief of the Bureau:

Even more troubling is that in response to the weak numbers, Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, baselessly accusing her of manipulating the jobs report for political ends. His action undermines the independence and credibility of one of the government’s most important statistical agencies, and will cast doubt on the credibility of future data releases on employment, inflation, productivity and other key indicators.

“Partisan” and “political” are not synonymous and I don’t believe the BLS is partisan. The challenge doesn’t reside in finding management who’ll ensure that the BLS produces results the president likes more but in ensuring the the BLS produces better, more reliable data over time and being better suited the task of providing information needed to formulate good, timely policy.