The Daily Parker

Economist Paul Krugman started what has become a 7-part overview of inequality in the United States: how it started, how it's going, and how it has corrupted our politics to an extent not seen since the 1890s:

Between World War II and the 1970s income disparities in America were relatively narrow. Some people were rich and many were poor, but overall inequality among Americans in terms of wealth, income and status was low enough that the country had a sense of shared prosperity. Things are very different today, as American society is beset by extreme inequality, economic fragmentation and class warfare.

What happened? The economic data show a huge widening of disparities in income and wealth starting around 1980, eventually undermining the relatively equal distribution of income we had from the 40s to the 70s. Moreover, growing disparities in income have led to growing disparities in political influence and the reemergence of what feels more and more like an oppressive class system.

But it hadn’t always been stable. People often call the period we’re living in a “New Gilded Age,” in recognition of an earlier era of extreme income and wealthy inequality. For the purpose of comparison, can we document that earlier era statistically?

[T]he 90-10 ratio (and other measures of wage inequality) suddenly declined in the 1940s, then stayed low for several decades before widening again. This is consistent with what we see in data on the share of income going to the top 1 percent. The relatively equal income distribution of postwar America didn’t evolve gradually. Instead it emerged quite suddenly, roughly during World War II, and didn’t disappear until decades after World War II ended.

Krugman planned a 2-part primer; as of yesterday, it has 7 parts. Spend the $6 on a Substack subscription and then an hour reading the series. It's worth it.

Cassie had a solid night of post-anesthesia sleep and woke up mostly refreshed. The cone still bums her out, and the surgery bill bums me out, but at least she's walking at close to her normal speed. She gets her stiches out—and her cone off—two weeks from today.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:

• Very stupid people have allowed measles, which we functionally eliminated from the US in 2000, to infect close to 1300 people this year.
• Jennifer Rubin argues that the Department of Homeland Security provides neither “freedom from danger” or “freedom from fear or anxiety,” i.e., security.
• Former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers is ashamed of the OAFPOTUS's tax bill and what it will do to the most vulnerable Americans.
• George Will praises former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel for holding the center against the loony left.
• Echoing my own thoughts, Stephanie Bai wants people to stop throwing blame around for this past weekend's Texas floods. (The blame for future disasters, however, falls squarely on the Republican Party.)
• Paul Krugman lauds victories over NIMBYs that are starting to revitalize building in urban areas.
• Cook County's practice of stealing people's homes for non-payment of property tax will likely cost us hundreds of millions of dollars once the class-action lawsuit gets going.
• Strava has once again lost control of its subscribers' location data, this time outing the Swedish prime minister's bodyguards, and thus the PM himself. Oops. (In fairness, it might be that the bodyguards themselves failed to protect the data by posting workouts publicly.)

Finally, lightning bugs appear to have made a small comeback in the Chicago area after a few years of reduced numbers. Educational campaigns have encouraged people to leave leaf litter undisturbed whenever possible, to allow the critters to breed safely. A mild winter and wet spring also helped a lot.

As promised, here's a roundup of some reactions to the tax bill with the infantile name that the Senate passed yesterday with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.

The Economist: "Despite Mr Trump’s talk of helping the least well-off, the bill’s biggest beneficiaries would be the rich. Analysis of the House version by scholars at the University of Pennsylvania suggests that Americans earning less than $16,999 would lose about $820 a year—a 5.7% reduction in median income for that group. The richest 0.1%, earning more than $4.3m, would gain $390,000, a 2.8% increase."

Elaine Godfrey (The Atlantic): "The bill’s passage is part of an abortion one-two punch: Last week, the Supreme Court made it easier for states to deny Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood. “This is tremendous progress on achieving a decades-long goal that has proved elusive in the past,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me in a statement about the SCOTUS decision and the GOP bill."

Adam Kinzinger: "Trump and many Republicans remain ideologically committed to tax cuts—especially for high earners and large donors. It’s a religion. Second, with defense, Medicare, and Social Security considered untouchable, social programs are the only place left to slash spending in order to offset revenue losses. And finally, there’s raw political fear: members of Congress worry that if they oppose the plan, Trump will back primary challengers against them. Just ask Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina—after Trump threatened to support a challenger, Tillis announced his retirement."

Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias: "I think you could see there’s a mismatch in the way Mike Johnson characterizes this. He talks about: We’ve got all these able-bodied young men who are sitting on the couch all day playing video games, collecting Medicaid benefits. But you don’t collect Medicaid benefits. Able-bodied young men are not racking up incredible medical bills, almost by definition. So for the bill to save money, it has to be cutting off care to people who are in fact sick and in need of medical care. That’s how the savings work. The only way to offset the cost of tax cuts is to deny medical care to people who need treatments."

Paul Krugman: "I don’t know how many of the right-wingers clamoring for drastic Medicaid cuts believe the stories they tell about waste and lazy Americans who won’t get a job. My guess, though, is that they don’t care whether these stories are true. They’re going after Medicaid because they see it as a soft target — a program that helps lower-income Americans, and who cares about them? Medicaid’s beneficiaries, they imagine, are the new welfare queens driving Cadillacs. But a funny thing has happened to public opinion about Medicaid. The share of Americans covered by the program has increased a lot over the past 15 years."

Satirist Jeff Maurer: "Though the details are still being hammered out, Congress is most of the way to a bill that addresses this country’s woes with surgical precision. Kudos, sirs and madams! You have proven yourself equal to the moment. Because — in my humble opinion — we sorely need three things: 1) A less-accessible health care system; 2) Commitment to 19th-century fuel sources, and 3) A debt crisis so severe that it could give rise to a pre-civilizational economy in which power is held by warlords and exemplary prostitutes. ... As sure as John Travolta’s career revived, we will see a revival of industrial smokestacks churning out greenhouses gases and particulate matter that will shroud out great cities."

Dan Rather: "One example of a barbaric and nonsensical funding cut that will have real-world consequences is a grant for the University of Texas’s World Reference Center. The WRC has been collecting and housing viruses since the 1950s. Scientists are able to study old viruses to help them combat new ones like Zika, West Nile, and Covid. ... Yes, the WRC was used to research and fight the COVID-19 virus, but the grant existed long before 2019."

Jennifer Rubin: "Republicans refuse to admit that they are hurting ordinary, hard-working Americans trying to provide for themselves and their families. To do otherwise would be a confession of their inhumanity. Instead, using well-worn authoritarian techniques (e.g., demonization, dehumanization, and marginalization), MAGA politicians convince themselves that those who rely on vital benefits are unfit and undeserving. Republicans dub them 'rats' or 'vermin' or 'murderers.'"

It's going to be a long 18 months until we get a new Congress.

I'll get to the ABBA—sorry, OBBBA—reactions after lunch. Right now, with apologies, here is a boring link dump:

• The Clown Prince of X is in the "finding out" phase, learning what happens to oligarchs who cross autocrats.
• Adam Kinzinger calls out the bribe that Shari Redstone's Paramount/CBS agreed to pay the OAFPOTUS to settle a bogus libel lawsuit stemming from a 2020 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris.
• After the US and Israeli attacks on Iran temporarily shut down Internet connectivity in the country, hundreds of pro-Scottish independence social media accounts went dark in what I'm sure the Iranian Government will call a bizarre coincidence.
• The UK Royal Family have decided to decommission the Royal Train, a version of which has carried the UK Head of State around the country since 1869.
• Cook County will open the first of 120 planned modular houses in Chicago to kick off a $12 million push for more affordable housing in the county.
• The Chicago Board of Education refused to hand over $175 million that it owed for pensions last year, leaving the city with an unexpected $161 million general-fund deficit.
• Richard Day tells Chicago Streets Blog what everyone has been saying since the pandemic: the Chicago Transit Authority needs to resume enforcing its own rules of passenger conduct again.
• Yesterday was the 90th birthday of the first Grant Park summer concert.
• Josh Marshall remembers Bill Moyers.

Finally, does a healthy adult really need to drink 4 liters of water per day? Well, it depends on a lot of things. National Geographic debunks this and five other myths about hydration.

And just because she's so pretty, here is a gratuitous photo of Cassie:

Note: I started this post at 8:30 am but got interrupted by work and HOA stuff.

What a day for right-wing Republicans! Early this morning they managed to pass the OAFPOTUS's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" through the Senate, with every Democrat and three Republicans (Rand Paul, KY; Thom Tillis, NC; Susan Collins, ME) voting against it, forcing Vice President Vance to get out of bed before 6am:

Vice President JD Vance cast the tiebreaking vote for the measure, which would extend trillions of dollars in tax cuts from Trump’s first term and implement new campaign promises — such as eliminating income taxes on tips and overtime wages — while spending hundreds of billions of dollars on immigration enforcement and defense.

To offset the cost, the legislation would cut about $1 trillion from Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for low-income individuals and people with disabilities, and other health care programs. It would also cut SNAP, the anti-hunger Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. Nearly 12 million people will lose health care coverage if the bill becomes law, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

[T]he measure is starkly regressive. The 10 percent of households with the lowest incomes would stand to be worse off by $1,600 on average because of benefits cuts, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the House version of the bill. The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes would be better off by $12,000 on average.

Combined with the impact of Trump’s tariffs — which the White House has argued will help pay for the bill’s tax cuts and new spending — the bottom 80 percent of households would see their take-home incomes fall, according to the Yale Budget Lab.

I'll have more reactions later, all of which I expect will use some variation on the phrase "most regressive Federal budget ever." The bill has to go back to the House of Representatives again because the Senate changed a few things, but it does look like it will pass—narrowly.

I'm sure it was a coincidence that televangelist con-man Jimmy Swaggart died almost immediately afterward:

Mr. Swaggart’s voice and passion carried him to fame and riches that he could scarcely have dreamed of in his small-town boyhood. At its peak in the mid-1980s, Jimmy Swaggart Worldwide Ministries had a television presence in more than 140 countries and, along with its Bible college, took in up to half a million dollars a day from donations and sales of Bible courses, gospel music and merchandise.

In October 1987, Mr. Swaggart was photographed entering a hot-sheet New Orleans motel with a woman. In a later television interview, the woman said that she and Mr. Swaggart had several encounters, describing them as “pornographic” but as not involving intercourse.

Mr. Swaggart responded in February 1988 with an extraordinary, tear-gushing mea culpa to some 7,000 followers at his World Faith Center in Baton Rouge. Turning first to his wife, Frances, he said, “Oh, I have sinned against you, and I beg your forgiveness.”

Some in the audience were so moved by the confession that they fell to their knees, praying in tongues, an indication to Pentecostals of possession by the Holy Spirit.

...or an indication to Psychologists of possession by intense cognitive dissonance, of the type that people experience when they realize they've wrapped their identity and worldview around a charlatan.

I guess the Lord giveth and He taketh away, right? Though if I were a religious person, I would see less of the Lord's work in both of these stories and more of the Adversary's.

Too bad Christopher Hitchens has left us. Given his obituary of Jerry Falwell, I can only imagine what he'd have to say about Swaggart.

I'm flying tomorrow and Sunday, giving me a few uninterrupted hours to read between now and Monday. So I'm just queuing some of these things up:

• The US Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law that prohibits certain medical interventions for minors who want to transition genders.
• As the opinion came from Justice Samuel Alito (R) and the dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor (I), I have a feeling both it and the dissent will satisfy no one.
• The Times characterizes the decision as setting back "the movement" a generation. I'm sure Andrew Sullivan will have a lot to say tomorrow, too.
• James Fallows contrasts his friend William Langewische with the OAFPOTUS's nominee to lead the Federal Aviation Administration.
• The New Republic has a series this week on "the obscene wealth issue."
• One more reason never to buy a Tesla: its cameras are always on.

Finally, after four years, the CTA Red Line stations at Lawrence, Argyle, Berwyn, and Bryn Mawr will re-open July 20th, which also means that Purple Line trains will resume running express. I am very pleased that a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar transport project actually finished on time and within budget in Chicago. If only we could do more of them.

I just finished 3½ hours of nonstop meetings that people crammed into my calendar because I have this afternoon blocked off as "Summer Hours PTO." Within a few minutes of finishing my last meeting, I rebooted my laptop (so it would get updated), closed the lid, and...looked at a growing pile of news stories that I couldn't avoid:

• Dan Rather calls tomorrow's planned Soviet-style military parade through DC a charade: "The military’s biggest cheerleader (at least today) didn’t serve in Vietnam because of 'bone spurs' and has repeatedly vilified our troops, calling them 'suckers and losers,'", Rather reminds us. "But when service members are needed for a photo op or to prop up flagging poll numbers, all is forgiven, apparently."
• Anne Applebaum reminds us of the history of revolutions, and what happens when the revolutionaries get frustrated that the masses don't agree with them (hint: ask Mao or the Bolsheviks.) "The logic of revolution often traps revolutionaries: They start out thinking that the task will be swift and easy. The people will support them. Their cause is just. But as their project falters, their vision narrows. At each obstacle, after each catastrophe, the turn to violence becomes that much swifter, the harsh decisions that much easier."
• James Fallows praises California governor Gavin Newsom (D) as "the adult in the room" for his response to the OAFPOTUS federalizing the California National Guard.
• Andrew Sullivan draws a straight line between the OAFPOTUS's behavior and an archetypical colonial-era caudillo.
• Timothy Noah, who may have his tongue planted firmly in his cheek, wonders aloud if the OAFPOTUS's incompetence relates somehow to his obsession with weight? (tl;dr: Narcissistic projection.)
• US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) agrees with the OAFPOTUS on only one thing she can think of: the need to abolish the debt ceiling. (I also agree!)
• The US House of Representatives voted 214-212 yesterday to claw back $1.1 billion in funding for public broadcasting, which particularly imperils NPR stations in Republican districts.
• Slate looks into signs that exurban areas may finally be slowing down their car-centric sprawl as the economics of maintaining all that barely-used infrastructure finally take hold.

Finally, Politico describes the absolute cluster of the Chicago Public Schools refusing to close nearly-empty buildings that, in some cases, cost $93,000 per student to keep open. But don't worry, mayor Brandon Johnson, a former Chicago Teachers Union president and now the least-popular mayor in city history, is on the case!

Comrade OAFPOTUS! (h/t Paul Krugman)

I've had a lot to do in the office today, so unfortunately this will just be a link fest:

• I agree with Jeff Maurer that "I hate that when some dickhead sets a car on fire, we have to talk about it for a week."
• Journalist G. Elliott Morris argues that the Los Angeles protests have a higher probability of hurting the OAFPOTUS than helping him.
• Paul Krugman sighs that "we finally know what 'American carnage' was about."
• Russian emigrés Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev have a list of Russian words to help explain the OAFPOTUS and his droogs.
• Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who served in the Wisconsin Air National Guard both here and in Afghanistan, has absolutely no patience for the OAFPOTUS militarizing the situation in Los Angeles.
• Jennifer Rubin similarly has no patience for referring to the first Defense Secretary who never served in uniform as a "warrior."
• Oh, and let's not forget the bill House Republicans passed a couple of weeks ago that, if the Senate passes it, would reshape American democracy in some pretty horrifying ways.
• Writer Michael Hirschorn thinks Democrats are missing a huge opportunity by staying away from bro-sphere podcasters like Joe Rogan.
• Both Google and Apple have reportedly added a time zone for Cape Breton Island after an article on a satirical Canadian site joked about the municipality creating an "even more annoying time zone between Atlantic and Newfoundland time."

Finally, while Graceland Cemetery in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood doubles as an arboretum and a great place to walk your dog, right now a different set of canids has sway. Graceland has temporarily banned pet dogs while a litter of coyote pups grows up. They are totes adorbs, but their parents have behaved aggressively towards people walking dogs nearby.

Cassie and I took a 7 km walk from sleep-away camp to Ribfest yesterday, which added up to 2½ hours of walkies including the rest of the day. Then we got some relaxing couch time in the evening. We don't get that many gorgeous weekend days in Chicago—perhaps 30 per year—so we had to take advantage of it.

Of course, it's Monday now, and all the things I ignored over the weekend still exist:

• Josh Marshall digs into the OAFPOTUS's attack on the state of California, noting that "all the federalizations [of the National Guard] during the Civil Rights Era were over the refusal of segregationist state governments to enforce federal law under court order. Trump’s argument is...[that] the President [has the right] to decide when a state government isn’t protecting or enforcing civil order to his liking and to intervene with federalized National Guard or the U.S. military to do it at the point of a bayonet. ... The crisis the administration insisted it needed to solve was a crisis of the administration’s creation."
• Philip Bump puts the encroaching fascism in broader context: "What’s important to remember about the fracture that emerged in Los Angeles over the weekend is that it came shortly after reports that President Donald Trump was seeking to block California from receiving certain federal funding. ... The point was that the Trump administration wanted to bring California to heel...."
• The Guardian highlights how Chicago has led the way in resisting the OAFPOTUS's xenophobic mass-deportation program, as part of our long history of respecting immigrant rights.
• Anne Applebaum looks at last week's election in Poland and feels a chill that "every election is now existential."
• Lisa Schwarzbaum, a former film critic for Entertainment Weekly, likens the OAFPOTUS's style of governing to Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom."
• Ezra Klein expresses surprise at who has objected the most to the recommendations in his recent book Abundance, and the left-wing emphasis on messaging: "Democrats aren’t struggling primarily because they choose the wrong messages. They’re struggling because they fail to solve problems. ... [Brandon] Johnson is the most proudly left-wing big-city mayor in the country. ... He’s also the least popular big-city mayor in the country and may well end up as the least popular mayor in Chicago’s history. Policy failure breeds political failure."
• Oh, by the way, Meta and Yandex have started to de-anonymize your Android device by abusing how your Internet browser works.

Finally, a community group on the Northwest Side has launched an effort to build a 5-km rails-to-trails plus greenway project to connect the Bloomingdale Trail with the North Branch Trail. This would create a direct connection between the southern flank of Lincoln Park and the Chicago Botanic Garden in suburban Glencoe. It's still early days, though. I'd love to see this in my lifetime. I'm also waiting for electrified railroads around Chicago, but this project would be a lot cheaper.

A smattering of stories this morning show how modern life is both better and worse than in the past:

• A criminologist at Cambridge has spent 15 years working on "murder maps" of London, Oxford, and York, showing just how awful it was to live in the 14th Century: "The deadliest of the cities was Oxford, which he estimated to have a homicide rate of about 100 per 100,000 inhabitants in the 14th century, while London and York hovered at 20 to 25 per 100,000. (In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, London’s homicide rate was about 1.2 per 100,000 inhabitants.)"
• An economist I've quoted often on The Daily Parker looks at the entirely-predictable falling out between the OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X and finds a perfect example of the worst corruption the US government has ever experienced: "both men start from the presumption that the U.S. government is an entirely corrupt enterprise, with the president in a position to hand out personal favors or engage in personal acts of vengeance."
• Yascha Mounk sees it as the OAFPOTUS failing to build a coalition. (That this feud has erupted between two malignant narcissists and may be entirely kayfabe is left unexplored by both writers.)
• Jeff Maurer takes a different view that is no less depressing: "that farting baby penguin is a harbinger of the end of democracy (is a sentence that I thought I’d never write). ... Trump found a major flaw in our system, which is that you can get away with illegal stuff as long as you do so much illegal stuff that nobody can keep track."
• A tech bro with about the competence you'd expect named Sahil Lavingia used an LLM to create a script that purged more than 600 Veterans Affairs contracts in a partially-successful attempt to become the Dunning-Krueger Champion for the month of April.
• I'm not sure Slate's Scaachi Koul is entirely fair to Katy Perry in an article from earlier this week, but it's a compelling read.

Finally, I plan to spend a good bit of this afternoon on my semi-compulsory half-day holiday reading an actual book, John Scalzi's When the Moon Hits Your Eye, his latest and one of his silliest. What would happen in the moon suddenly turned to cheese? Hilarity, in Scalzi's world. It's a lot more fun to read than any newspaper.

And then...dinner at Ribfest!