This machine has brewed its last cup. How much is the new one?
The $42.39 price is 42 percent inflation relative to the $29.88 price paid in 2017. What does the official government site say? It should cost $35.88 (20 percent inflation).
Separately, if you don’t like the weak Keurig coffee, you might enjoy this one though it is slightly more effort. Keurig is trying to be French press coffee, but with minimal contact time between water and grounds. A standard drip machine like this yields a more intense drink.
There has been a lot of drama in the currency and bond markets regarding the new UK government’s economic policy, which sounds like it is along the lines of what the U.S. did in the 1980s. President Ronald Reagan proposed shrinking government with spending cuts so that tax cuts could be implemented; Congress agreed to the tax cuts, but refused to cut spending and the result was massive deficits, which eventually faded due to economic growth.
The UK government is already somewhat leaner than what we have in the U.S. Heritage says that the UK government consumes 42 percent of GDP, which is a touch higher than the US government (39 percent), but the UK figure includes nearly all health care spending. If we add government-mandated-and-regulated “private” health care to the US number, we get closer to 50 percent of GDP.
The business folks and investors with whom I spoke in the UK were generally positive regarding Prime Minister Truss‘s plan, which they felt would deliver a substantial amount of growth. They attributed much of the hatred and hysteria to an anti-Conservative press. On the other hand, hatred and hysteria in currency and bond markets isn’t usually driven by whatever the Guardian has to say.
One part of Truss’s plan seemed insane to me, i.e., preventing consumers from seeing that prices for energy have gone up. But the French are also doing it. Wholesale electricity prices are up 5X and consumers are paying… 1X. Party On with printed money.
Britain is the only Group of Seven country with a smaller economy today than in the fourth quarter of 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic. In the 40 quarters preceding the pandemic, its economy grew at an annual rate of less than 2 percent more than half the time.
Maybe a country where all of the young people get stumbling drunk every night at the pub isn’t ideally situated for growth?
The government’s tax plan would cancel a scheduled increase in the corporate tax rate to 25 percent from 19 percent and would make permanent a temporary increase in the annual investment allowance, letting businesses deduct the full cost of qualifying plants and machinery up to 1 million pounds in the first year.
This sounds reasonable to me! With a 25 percent rate, a company would have to be crazy to refrain from pushing all of the profits into Ireland (12.5 percent rate and full membership in the EU if frictionless trade with Europe is required). The depreciation simplification should front-load investment and activity and shouldn’t change the tax owed in the long run (spending one million pounds will yield one million pounds of deductions against revenue).
The most questionable parts of the plan are the income tax cuts. Reducing the basic rate of income tax by one percentage point, to 19 percent, will fuel consumption at a time when the Bank of England is attempting to curb inflation.
The prime minister’s proposal to eliminate the 45 percent tax bracket on incomes above 150,000 pounds per year — the top 1.1 percent — was also unwise in the current fiscal and economic environment, …
I’m not sure that a 45 percent rate is revenue-maximizing. At that rate, a Brit would get a great return on pushing activities offshore or structuring activities to get the 10 percent entrepreneur’s rate. The U.S. government is greedy for money and the top personal income tax rate is 37 percent (which works out to 37 percent in Florida or 50.3 percent in California).
It looks like the markets are locking Britain into the same policies that put it on the slow bus to economic mediocrity. Given some reasonable value placed on leisure and drunkenness, the decision to forgo the second job or language study and spend the evening in the pub with friends will be a rational one. For those who are ambitious, the decision to emigrate will likely be a rational one (one of our neighbors in Florida recently arrived from the UK, having accepted a transfer within a multinational industrial products company (held up for more than a year due to coronapanic restrictions on non-walk-across-the-border-and-claim-asylum immigration); he will do the same thing that he did in the UK, but for a much larger market).
What am I missing? My default assumption is that markets are right, but I can’t figure out what is so terrible wrong with the latest British government’s plans. Is part of the explanation that the pound isn’t the world’s reserve currency and therefore the consequences of deficit spending are more severe than they are for the U.S.?
Separately, how can a country full of midgets and randoms fail to thrive?
I hope that everyone had a good Latinx Heritage Month (September 15-October 15 because the Mayan calendar is used?). The Democrats seem to have rebranded themselves the “Abortion Care for Pregnant People Seeking Reproductive Health Care Party”. We flipped on the TV after school last month so that the kids could enjoy a U.S. Open match. A commercial for Val Demings came on. Mx. Demings is challenging Marco Rubio for a U.S. Senate seat. During a spot that mentioned no issues other than abortion care, our 7-year-old learned the following words and phrases: abortion, rape, abortion, incest, abortion, sexual assault, incest, and abortion. The ad was then repeated multiple times during the match. No ads for Mx. Demings that were not abortion care-related were shown. I’m sure that the transition to focus on abortion care over all other issues has been carefully tested by Democrats with respect to motivating voter turnout, etc., but I wonder how well it will work with the Latinx. Consider that in Latinx America, where democracy is the prevailing form of government, abortion care for pregnant people in all stages of pregnancy, as is available as part of reproductive health care in a variety of Democrat-run U.S. states, is not available. In fact, voters in many Latinx American nations have settled on near-total bans on abortion care for pregnant people in reproductive health care settings. If the Latinx in Central America are not passionate about offering abortion care to every pregnant person, why will the Latinx in the U.S. vote for politicians whose principal promise is abortion care for every womb?
Marco Rubio wants to criminalize doctors and ban abortions with no exceptions for rape and incest. I’m fighting to save our freedoms.
I am still afraid of catching COVID. As a young, healthy, bivalently boosted physician, I no longer worry that I’ll end up strapped to a ventilator, but it does seem plausible that even a mild case of the disease could shorten my life, or leave me with chronic fatigue, breathing trouble, and brain fog.
Rather, [the ravages of COVID] emerge during the middle phase of post-infection, a stretch that lasts for about 12 weeks after you get sick. This period of time is so menacing, in fact, that it really ought to have its own, familiar name: medium COVID.
Dr. Karen has plenty of company in the halls of medicine:
Yet many have inferred that COVID’s dangers have no end. “What’s particularly alarming is that these are really life-long conditions,” Ziyad Al-Aly, the lead researcher on the veterans studies, told the Financial Times in August. A Cleveland Clinic cardiologist has suggested that catching SARS-CoV-2 might even become a greater contributor to cardiovascular disease than being a chronic smoker or having obesity.
The last point shows how great Science is. Consider a 300 lb. human who has spent the last 2.5 years Following the Science by staying home and snacking, thus avoiding catching SARS-CoV-2. Compare to Novak Djokovic, who has been infected with the deadly virus at least once. A layperson might imagine that Djokovic is healthier than the couch whale, but Science tells us that the 300 lb. Playstation hero is the better insurance bet. (The Biden Administration agrees, which is why the plague-ridden unvaccinated Djokovic is still banned from entering the United States.)
COVID is so deadly that people are dying before they can be dragged to the hospital:
By the end of the Omicron surge last winter, one in four Americans—about 84 million people—had been newly infected with the coronavirus. This was on top of 103 million pre-Omicron infections. Yet six months after the surge ended, the number of adult emergency-room visits, outpatient appointments, and hospital admissions across the country were all slightly lower than they were at the same time in 2021, according to an industry report released last month. In fact, emergency-room visits and hospital admissions in 2021 and 2022 were lower than they’d been before the pandemic.
Keep wearing your cloth mask inside the world’s most packed art museums:
The pervasiveness of medium COVID does nothing to negate the reality of long COVID—a calamitous condition that can shatter people’s lives. Many long-haulers experience unremitting symptoms, and their cases can evolve into complex chronic syndromes like ME/CFS or dysautonomia. As a result, they may require specialized medical care, permanent work accommodations, and ongoing financial support. Recognizing the small chance of such tragic outcomes could well be enough to make some people try to avoid infection or reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 at all costs.
Long COVID is real and we should expect an expansion of deficit spending to feed the author’s industry, plus tons of money shoveled out to those who spend years at home with Netflix and Xbox. “At all costs” means go to the theme park, get into a packed airliner for a vacation rather than drive, go to the grocery store in person rather than having a Latinx essential worker deliver, etc., while wearing the simple cloth or surgical masks that Dr. Fauci suggested in the spring of 2020. Here’s someone avoiding COVID on October 10, 2022 at the Louvre (fortunately, the ventilation system got a big upgrade during the reign of Emperor Napoleon III):
And here’s a simple mask blocking SARS-CoV-2 in what turned out to be the least crowded room within the Versailles chateau:
Facebook has lifted a ban on posts claiming Covid-19 was man-made, following a resurgence of interest in the “lab leak” theory of the disease’s onset.
The social network says its new policy comes “in light of ongoing investigations into the origin”.
In February, Facebook explicitly banned the claim, as part of a broad policy update aimed at “removing more false claims about Covid-19 and vaccines”. In a public statement at the time, it said: “Following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines.”
What’s the truth this week? Due to my failure to become a virologist, I express no opinion on the origin of this or any other virus. What about people who are virologists? Fortunately, there are still plenty of limits on what they can say:
Facebook is keen to ensure that a change in one rule doesn’t lead to a free-for-all for Covid misinformation. On the same day that it lifted the ban on lab-leak theories, it tightened up restrictions on users who “repeatedly share misinformation on Facebook”.
Earlier this month, the court upheld a preposterous Texas law stating that online platforms with more than 50 million monthly active users in the United States no longer have First Amendment rights regarding their editorial decisions. Put another way, the law tells big social-media companies that they can’t moderate the content on their platforms.
Part of this fiasco touches on the debate around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which, despite its political-lightning-rod status, makes it extremely clear that websites have editorial control. “Section 230 tells platforms, ‘You’re not the author of what people on your platform put up, but that doesn’t mean you can’t clean up your own yard and get rid of stuff you don’t like.’ That has served the internet very well,” Dan Novack, a First Amendment attorney, told me. In effect, it allows websites that host third-party content to determine whether they want a family-friendly community or an edgy and chaotic one. This, Masnick argued, is what makes the internet useful, and Section 230 has “set up the ground rules in which all manner of experimentation happens online,” even if it’s also responsible for quite a bit of the internet’s toxicity too.
What do we think will happen? Until this Texas situation arose, Facebook was immune under Section 230 from the liability that a publisher or speaker would have, but the company also could enforce an editorial point of view on whatever topics it chose. It has enjoyed the immunity of a phone company with, actually, tighter control of point of view than the New York Times (which sometimes invites a Republican or fake Republican onto the editorial page just to stir things up). It seems too good to be true, but maybe Facebook is big, rich, and influential enough to hold onto this status?
If you tried to put out a fire with water, and the fire got no smaller even after 3 attempts, you’d hopefully realize this is no normal water and/or this is no normal fire. And if you were able to come to this conclusion, you would not be the Fed.
My response was “I think the government may itself be the inflation spiral. Government is nearly half the economy and everything the government pays money for is indexed to inflation. Medicare, military and similar contracts, Social Security, pensions, employee salaries, etc.”
If everything that is part of the local/state/federal government sector is indexed to inflation, doesn’t that mean that inflation goes down only if horrific pain is being inflicted on those dumb enough to be in the private sector? If government workers are getting cost-of-living adjustments (COLA), their spending power by definition cannot change (assuming that the BLS is calculating the CPI correctly). If the CPI says prices went up by 10 percent, the government workers will have 10 percent more in salary to go chasing after a mostly fixed supply of goods. This is the classic wage-price spiral.
Government is not 100 percent of the U.S. economy, so maybe the wage-price spiral can be broken if significant spending power reductions are imposed on non-union non-government workers. But at some level of government control of the economy, the spiral should be unbreakable regardless of interest rates and regardless of how poor the private sector chumps become.
(Why “non-union”? Union workers typically would have an automatic COLA increase and we could also consider union workers part of the government sector because they depend on the government to sustain their union power.)
Loosely related… prices and government worker wages go around in the Bois de Boulogne:
Related:
“Inflation Is Unrelenting, Bad News for the Fed and White House” (New York Times, today): “This is a self-inflicted wound that will impact the most vulnerable members of our society the most,[” said Mohamed El-Erian] (I think that El-Erian is saying what I say above, but more succinctly; everyone involved with the government will be 100 percent protected from inflation, which means that the peasants are going to be destroyed to keep those affiliated with the government from feeling any pain)
“Retirees Catch a Break With the Social Security COLA” (WSJ): On Thursday, the Social Security Administration said recipients will get an 8.7% increase in their payments next year and, for the second year in a row, that actually exceeds estimates of how much their costs increased. That is according to a 35-year-old initiative to measure the true rate of inflation facing those over 62, via an experimental consumer-price index produced by the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, known as the CPI-E; the E stands for “elderly.” … This year, the COLA was 8.7%, more than the 8% rise in the CPI-E.
Here in Paris, I met a guy who works in real estate development in Los Angeles. Assuming that you’ve already got the land, what does it cost to build a McMansion-grade house? “$500 per square foot,” he responded. How about an apartment building for the middle class? “Closer to $400 per square foot,” was the answer (same as levelset.com). So the 2,500-square-foot house costs $1.25 million to build and the 1000-square-foot apartment will cost $400,000 to build… assuming that land is free.
“Rents have a long way to go up before they cover these kinds of costs for new construction, plus the land and all of the permitting,” he said.
I am not sure how California is going to house all of the migrants that it says it wants to welcome. How many folks who show up in the U.S. not speaking English will earn enough to pay $2 million for a house (construction plus land costs) or $600,000 for a condo (construction plus land costs)? At current interest rates, the nerdwallet calculator says that a Californian earning $200,000 per year can afford a $675,000 house (Census.gov says that median household income in California is less than $80,000 per year).
From these same folks, I learned that the cost of a suite in one of Paris’s nicer hotels is normally $2,800 per night, but they were paying $2,100.
the venue where the conversation happened, a house that would cost a lot more than $500/sf to replicate. Note the visitor using a cloth mask to protect him/her/zir/theirself against an aerosol virus in one of the world’s most crowded indoor environments whose ventilation system was put in by Louis XIV and got its last significant upgrade in 1698. Was the trip to Versailles actually necessary or could he/she/ze/they have stayed home and saved lives?
cloth masks again… outside in the bright French sunshine:
and, because I know Mike will want to see this, one last Warrior for Science in a hall depicting heroes in various French battles (note failure to shave beard while attempting to seal out aerosols with a mask):
Both decisions could collectively cost customers more than $3 billion in the next three years and are being closely watched… The first issue regulators will decide is a rule that implements a law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis this year that will allow utility companies such as Florida Power & Light, Duke Energy and Tampa Electric to charge customers so they can bury power lines in order to reduce storm-related outages in the future.
I wonder if the folks who opposed the Tallahassee Tyrant’s spending initiative on electric grid hardening and undergrounding are still opposed!
Separately, do we have a final verdict on the restoration of public services in Florida by Team DeSantis? Aside from repairs to and/or replacement of individual structures, what’s left to be done?
At the edge of the park surrounding the Tower, a scene was playing out. A Black man was on the ground, in George Floyd position, while two white guys were handcuffing and generally abusing him. He was pleading for mercy in French. From what I could infer, the noble Black man had been apprehended by these two white cops in the act of attempting to steal a mobile phone from a tourist who looked to be in her 60s. A moment of reflection sufficed to realize that the cops and robber had to be confederates. Since when have the French police actually arrested a pickpocket, much less thrown him/her/zir/them to the ground? The white guys were not in uniform. A younger American man began to shout (in English, of course!) his demand that they show their badges. I’m not sure if he was a confederate or a victim. We edged away, but I don’t think that any badges were shown.
The question for today… how were the three actors planning to profit from this sidewalk theater?
(London seems to be a lot more orderly as well as less plagued by trash on the sidewalks!)
Airliners and Hurricane Ian at 6 pm on Wednesday, September 28. Note Spirit (NKS517) at about 32,700′ (^32700) above the ground flying straight over the hurricane itself:
How ugly did it get on the ground? Here’s the worst-looking METAR that I found from the big airport in Fort Myers:
