In an article in the Wall Street Journal Heather Haddon and Annie Gasparro write about the latest shortage to afflict consumers. First it was toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and disinfectant spray. Now it’s ketchup packets:

After enduring a year of closures, employee safety fears and start-stop openings, many American restaurants are now facing a nationwide ketchup shortage. Restaurants are trying to secure the tabletop staple after Covid-19 upended the condiment world order. Managers are using generic versions, pouring out bulk ketchup into individual cups and hitting the aisles of Costco for substitutes.

“We’ve been hunting high and low,” said Chris Fuselier, owner of Denver-based Blake Street Tavern, who has struggled to keep ketchup in stock for much of this year.

The pandemic turned many sit-down restaurants into takeout specialists, making individual ketchup packets the primary condiment currency for both national chains and mom-and-pop restaurants. Packet prices are up 13% since January 2020, and their market share has exploded at the expense of tabletop bottles, according to restaurant-business platform Plate IQ.

Even fast-food giants are pleading for packets. Long John Silver’s LLC, a nearly 700-unit chain, had to seek ketchup from secondary suppliers because of the rush in demand. The industry’s pandemic shift to packets has pushed up prices, costing the Louisville, Ky.-based company an extra half-million dollars, executives said, since single-serve is pricier than bulk.

“Everyone out there is grabbing for ketchup,” Chief Marketing Officer Stephanie Mattingly said.

What is unclear to me, either from the article or from additional research, is where in the supply chain the problem has cropped up or if it is, indeed, everywhere.

For Kraft Heinz, the 500 lb. gorilla of ketchup and most condiments, it may not be quite as simple as ordering more. For example, the tomato varieties used in Heinz ketchup are tailored specifically to the brand and grown exclusively for Kraft Heinz. The harvest was the harvest. I haven’t been able to determine whether Kraft Heinz manufactures their own ketchup packets or whether they’re made for them. In either case they may be made overseas.

And then there are the environmental issues. Single serve condiment packages are terrible for the environment. They tend to be multi-material, too costly to recycle.

I really ought to write a post on retail packaging. Most people don’t think about it but you can basically date modern retail to two developments: single use packaging and mass advertising. That is going to be a substantial impediment to plans to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2040, 2050 or 2550. A lot of that packaging is dependent on oil. Dispensing with that packaging would be disastrous for retail and would land on the poorest Americans hardest.

Yesterday when I went to my main PC I was confronted by a black screen. I quickly verified that the PC was fine but the monitor was malfunctioning. I replaced it temporarily with a spare (I tend to have spares on hand for most computer components), checked how quickly Amazon would get me a replacement, then ordered a replacement online with Micro Center. An hour or so later I hopped in my car, drove to the Micro Center store (about 7.5 miles away), got into the queue for Internet orders, picked up my replacement monitor and took it home.

It took me an hour or so to get the new monitor working. As it turned out although the cable I had been using worked fine with other monitors it didn’t work with the new monitor. Fortunately, I had a spare cable (remember: I keep spares) and my spare cable worked. So, a mere two and half hours after I realized there was a problem I was back in operation. That sort of cut into my day.

As a step towards reducing the number of gun homicides, in his latest New York Times column Nikolas Kristof proposes the following:

But there is a way to stem the tide of a new type of gun that is proliferating unchecked. President Biden can use executive action to crack down on “ghost guns,” which avoid regulation and serial numbers because they are sold unfinished or as kits.

“Ghost guns have taken off, and they’re untraceable,” said Dr. Garen Wintemute, a gun violence expert at the University of California at Davis. Law enforcement agencies recovered about 10,000 ghost guns in 2019, and they account for 30 percent of all firearms taken in gun trafficking investigations in California. Ghost guns have been used in at least three mass shootings in California, Wintemute said.

White nationalists have seized upon the chance to build secret arsenals through ghost guns. Last year, a supporter of the extremist boogaloo movement allegedly used a ghost weapon to kill a law enforcement officer, and the men accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, also had ghost guns.

I have no opposition to that measure although I would prefer that the Congress enact a law against “ghost guns” which President Biden could then sign into law.

However, I wonder if Mr. Kristof has reasonable expectations for the results of such a law? There are many ways of obtaining firearms that are less expensive than “ghost guns”. Most frequently the guns used in crimes are either stolen or gifts from family and friends. IMO a better way to “stop the parade of gun deaths” would be to crack down on such gifts. Some states have laws requiring all firearms to be sold through licensed dealers. That seems to me to be a commonsense measure for controlling the sale of firearms.

Here in Chicago in 2021 year-to-date there have been 142 gun homicides, 7 on Easter Sunday alone. We’re on track to have the bloodiest year in our history relative to population. By far the greatest number of victims were young black men (83.3% of victims were black; the ratio of men killed to women killed is about 6:1). It is assumed that the perpetrators of these crimes were mostly young, black men as well although practically no perpetrators have been identified for any of these killings.

Offhand I’d speculate that none of those homicides used a “ghost gun”. Note that Mr. Kristof identified one instance of a “ghost gun” having been used in a homicide last year. That’s .001% of homicides.

One of the points Noah Smith made in his post that I agree with is that things aren’t working so we should change what we’re doing. But what is it that we’re doing that’s not working? I think it’s:

• I think the Clinton era tax reforms have been a disaster from the standpoint of income inequality and economic growth. We need to revert back to the treatment of executive income that prevailed before those changes. They’re not working.
• Maintaining a loose labor market via immigration or, as Jared Bernstein put it, turning on the immigration spigot whenever somebody’s wages go up, has not worked.
• Decreasing U. S. production hasn’t worked. The dream of becoming a society that consumes without producing is a fantasy.
• The Clinton era bank reforms have been a disaster, too. In 2009 we should have seized the opportunity presented to us to break up the big banks. Foolishly, we didn’t.
• Cutting personal income taxes, first during the Bush Administration and again during the Trump Administration, has perhaps worked a little but it has increased personal consumption without increasing business investment. I don’t believe that’s working.
• Spreading democracy via hard power whether that hard power is military might or economic might isn’t working. On the other hand spreading democracy via soft power was an enormous success. Too bad that the former has diminished the latter. Taking every foreign policy decision that either Bush Administration or the Clinton Administration made and doing the opposite wouldn’t be a bad start. The Obama Administration’s decisions to support the putsch in Ukraine and attempt to do the same thing in Syria were bad decisions, too.

What else is or isn’t working?

To be completely honest there’s a lot that I like in Noah Smith’s post, an attempt to explain “Bidenomics”. Some of his points are points I’ve made myself:

• Cuts in marginal tax rates have not increased business investment.
• Cuts in marginal tax rates have not resulted in people working more.
• Income inequality has risen sharply since 1980.

but, since I disagree with the premises of his post, it’s hard for me to agree with his assessment of the Biden Administration’s economic policies. Here are his premises:

The last economic policy paradigm, bequeathed to us by Ronald Reagan (and Paul Volcker), was based around tax cuts, deregulation, welfare cuts, and tight monetary policy. These were intended as remedies for the two main economic problems of the 1970s — slow growth and inflation, together known as “stagflation”. The idea that tax cuts boost growth comes from basic economic theory; in almost any model, taxes distort the economy (except for things like carbon taxes), so if you cut taxes it should make the economy more efficient, thus increasing growth at least temporarily. The idea that deregulation boosts growth was more of an article of faith — since “regulation” means a ton of different things, there’s no economic model that can capture it in a general sense (actually deregulation really started under Carter, who arguably did more than Reagan). Welfare cuts were partly based on economic theory — means-tested welfare programs are a form of implicit taxation, which theoretically discourages people from working — and part dogma about a “culture of dependence”. As for tight monetary policy — or more accurately, an anti-inflationary bias at the Fed — that was obviously just a response to inflation.

We can argue back and forth about whether the Reagan paradigm ever boosted growth; in fact, I don’t know the answer. The late 80s and 90s were good years for American incomes and the 90s and early 00s were good years for productivity. How much tax cuts and deregulation had to do with that is up for debate, and how much the country benefitted from reduced inflation is also arguable.

But it’s clear that by the 2000s and 2010s, the Reaganite paradigm wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do.

What should be apparent is that for his analysis to hold water we must, indeed, have cut taxes, deregulated, cut welfare, and had tight monetary policy. Did we? I would submit that by objective measures none of those things has happened. Let’s start with taxes:

To my eye what that says is that whether you measure tax revenues in terms of dollars, inflation-adjusted dollars, or as a percentage of GDP we have not cut taxes. Let’s dig into the most generous assessment (percentage of GDP).

Basically, revenues as a percentage of GDP have been flat since 1980. What are true are that a) marginal rates have been cut and b) we have not increased revenues as a percentage of GDP. From that at most I’d conclude that marginal tax rates are not economically relevant. Now let’s consider deregulation.

Here’s a telling chart of economically significant regulations issued by year since 1980:

The story that graph tells is pretty conclusive. Regulations have increased year on year, administration on administration since 1980 and that includes during the Trump Administration when you take 2020 into account. But even that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Federal regulations are cumulative. Unless expressly removed which only happens very rarely they increase year by year. Here’s a graph of the number of pages in the Federal Register, the official journal of the federal government’s agency rules, proposed rules, and official announcements:

Under the Trump Administration there may have been a small reduction in the total amount of regulation but arguing that we’ve been cutting regulations for decades is one step too far. How about welfare?

Here’s a graph of federal welfare spending as a percentage of GDP:

The different colors represent the major categories of welfare spending (unemployment, families and children, housing). All sorts of things might be concluded from that chart. That welfare spending has decreased is not one of them. But even that graph does not tell the whole story because it doesn’t include healthcare spending. Here’s a graph of federal Medicaid spending over the last 20 years:

If you’re wondering about Medicaid spending since 2015, that has increased, too, but has roughly maintained the same percentage of GDP. So welfare spending hasn’t been cut, either. How about monetary policy? Have we had a tight monetary policy over the last 20 years?

The answer to that is a resounding “No”. As it turns out there’s actually a way of measuring the looseness or tightness of monetary policy, cf. “the Taylor Rule”. The graph below illustrates the relation of the Fed Funds rate to various forms of the Taylor Rule:

Summarizing what that graph says in words, monetary policy was too loose from 2001 through 2005 and has been too loose since 2008. That’s 17 of the last 20 years. Even shorter: we have not had a tight monetary policy. We’ve had a loose monetary policy.

I’m going to try and wrap this post up. Don’t mouth political nostrums at me. If you’re going to make an argument based on your observation that certain things have happened, be prepared to support your views with evidence. Right now I don’t believe the available supports the notions that we’ve actually cut taxes, deregulated, cut welfare, or had a tight monetary policy. What has been done is that we have lower taxes, fewer regulations, less welfare and a tighter monetary policy than might otherwise have been the case in the absence of countervailing actions. That’s not the same as low taxes, few regulations, less welfare, and tight monetary policy.

Last night my wife and I streamed 63UP. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, back in 1964 British filmmaker Paul Almond, assisted by Michael Apted, made a documentary about 14 British seven-year-olds (10 boys and 4 girls) from different parts of Britain and different social classes—7 Up!. At least in part I think it was intended to be an “out of the mouths of babes” sort of treatment of the British class system.

Every seven years since then Mr. Apted has released another installment, interviewing the same individuals. One of the girls, Lynn, died in 2013. Mr. Apted himself died in 2019 at 79.

The series is fantastic, fascinating and 63UP is no exception. The now 13 individuals are no longer cute kids but pensioners, largely philosophical about their lives.

If you get a chance, track the series down.

Whenever I read the word “intervention”, my blood runs cold. Far too frequently for Americans it means military intervention. I was a bit relieved when I read Ezzedine C. Fishere’s op-ed in the Washington Post but to tell the truth only a little. He’s writing in concern about the rising tensions between Egypt and Ethiopia over Ethiopia’s construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Nile. A quick glance at a population density map of Egypt reveals the source of his concern. Nearly all of Egypt’s population lives on the banks of the Nile or in its delta. Egyptians are correct in viewing any diminution in the river’s flow as an existential threat. Here’s what he’s looking for:

There is little point in apportioning blame in the current diplomatic failure; it doesn’t move the parties closer to an agreement. There is equally little point in engaging in legal debates about rights and obligations related to trans-boundary waterways. Both countries have stretched their interpretation of international law without getting anywhere. Ultimately, Egypt and Ethiopia rely more on the laws of power than the power of laws.

The challenge, therefore, is to take the two countries by the hand toward an agreement that respects their most cherished goals. Ideally, international rivers are best managed by transnational bodies that reconcile the interests of states and treat the river as an integrated ecosystem. But it is unlikely the countries will agree to that system.

A muscular diplomatic approach is needed. Both countries have extensive relations with the United States and China. While they too mistrust each other, they still need to reduce the scope of their rivalry and find zones of convergence.

As I see it our interests in either Egypt or Ethiopia are extremely narrow. We have little leverage over either country and little we should be offering them. The best we should hope for is to engage in negative reciprocity with China which probably has even less interest in either country than we do. That’s probably not what Mr. Fishere is hoping for.

I expect to see a lot more stories along these lines over time. Conflicts over water are not limited to Ethiopia and Egypt. The conflict between Israel and Syria is largely over water as a quick glance at a hydrological map of the two countries should suggest to you. There are also Turkey, Syria, and Iraq; Afghanistan and Iran; China and Laos; Turkey and Armenia; even the U. S. and Mexico.

I would not be a bit surprised if the great conflicts over resources during the 21st century were to be about water rather than oil.

There are times when I wonder if there are people reading this blog and quietly being influenced by it. In his Washington Post column Josh Rogin muses over the possibility, supported by former CDC director Robert Redfield, that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Here’s the conclusion of his column:

Flinders University medical professor Nikolai Petrovsky, one of more than two dozen scientists, including Ebright, who signed an open letter calling for a full and independent investigation into covid-19’s origins, told me the Chinese government now realizes it can’t prevent a real investigation into the Wuhan labs and therefore is calling for all such labs worldwide to be investigated. And that, he says, is actually a great idea.

“I agree this is entirely appropriate, although clearly most of the immediate focus would need to be on the Wuhan labs, given their geography and the work they were doing,” he said.

If Redfield is right, that would mean China bears some accountability for the outbreak, which will greatly complicate already tense relations. If Redfield is right, that would also mean the U.S. government had a big role in supporting the research that resulted in the pandemic outbreak. If Redfield is right, the current response plan could greatly increase, not reduce, the risk of another pandemic.

These are all very unpleasant facts. But facts are stubborn things. And we have no choice but to pursue all possible theories and accept whatever truth the facts lead to. This must be done in a nonpolitical way, to show Beijing and the world that we still have the ability to place public health and truth above the narratives to which we have become beholden.

Just to be crystal clear in what I think we should be doing, I believe that

• We should assume that SARS-CoV-2 did originate at the WIV.
• Until that can be disproven conclusively we should greatly reduce travel to and from China.
• We should quarantine all travelers from China or who have visited China recently for at least two weeks before allowing them entry into the U. S.
• We should greatly reduce our trade with China.

I wouldn’t be upset at all if China reciprocated. In fact, I’d welcome it.

There’s an interesting post at Axios by Jonathan Swan, analyzing the data on Hispanic voters from the 2020 presidential election:

A new analysis of U.S. voters suggests — counterintuitively — that the coronavirus pandemic may have helped drive former President Donald Trump’s surprising increase in support from Latinos last November.

The short version is

• Trump received a sharp increase in votes from Hispanics compared with 2016.
• That increase wasn’t limited to Cuban-Americans but true of Hispanic voters generally.
• “YouTube has become a leading source of election news for Latinos”

which tends to support points I’ve made around here. Hispanics are not single-issue voters. They are frequently not as supportive of activist government as Democratic voters, generally. Like black voters they tend to be more conservative than Democratic voters, generally.

I tend to believe that “Hispanic voters” itself is an over-generalization. I think that one may reasonably consider Cuban-American voters, Mexican-American voters, Salvadoran-American voters but that “Hispanic voters” conceals more than it reveals.