I highlighted the objectionable statement

The price of gasoline

The wife came home from shopping yesterday and happily reported that the price of gas is under $3 per gallon. Not much under $3, at $2.99⁹, but under.

There's been a cloud over me lately, the concern that fighting inflation leads to recession, and that strong-willed cutting of federal spending turns recession into depression -- What, me worry? -- so when the she  said the price of gas was down, between my ears I pictured it as global demand for gasoline, down because of the oncoming depression.

Hey, it could happen. But I always tend to think worst-case. I don't see actual evidence that things are going bad any faster than usual. Maybe it's all between my ears. Still, I suddenly wanted to look at a picture of the price of gasoline.

FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000074714

The graph shows a national average price for unleaded regular (for cities, if I read the graph title right). 

We use unleaded regular but we don't live in The City of Average Prices, and I have no idea how yesterday's price stands in relation to FRED's averages.  But I put a red extension on the end of the gas price line, to bring the number down from November's $3.181 to the local $2.999 for January 5, 2025.

For context, I also show three little red dots on the graph, for March of 2020, 2021, and 2022. March of 2022 is when the Fed started increasing the interest rate to fight inflation. The average price of gas peaked above $5 per gallon in June of 2022, then started working its way back down. 

 

I notice that the low points since June 2022 occur in December 2022 and about a year later in January 2024. If this is "seasonal" behavior, we could be at another low now. And the price of gasoline could soon be going up again.

But for now, anyway, I can see that gasoline prices are lower than they've been for a while. The wife was right.

PS: I did say "I don't see actual evidence that things are going bad any faster than usual." But I don't have a satisfactory way to measure that.

Two questions and an inquiry

The first question today: is homeownership the same as home ownership?

Yeah, but I have a little trouble being confident in that answer. So I asked another question: is public the same as public sector?

Oh, okay, good answer, especially if I stop at the first or second comma. (I don't think of the public sector as a subset of the public, but I could be wrong about that.) I didn't know what to expect, after the answer I got a couple months back. So let me ask again the question I asked then: what is "outside financial wealth"

The first sentence of this response, all by itself, is better than what I came up with this morning in preparation for writing this post. The AI's highlighted part, only ten words long, is perfect.

Real Median Family Income 1953-2023

"What do voters and non-voters really think about Donald Trump?"

"In our December 2024 sample, Harris defeated Trump by 3 percentage points among 2024 voters who also voted in 2020. Among 2024 voters who didn’t vote in 2020, she lost by 12 points."

A fascinating read, at the Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog: What do voters and non-voters really think about Donald Trump?

Real GDP and the Trend of Peaks

Annual US Real GDP Growth Rate and the Trend of Peaks  1948-2023

On the difference between Democrat and Republican Thinking

I didn't read the thing, but I looked at Kamala's 82-page PDF "A New Way Forward for the Middle Class: A Plan to Lower Costs and Create an Opportunity Economy".  Note that her plan, first thing, is "to lower costs". This was without doubt a response to the widespread, often repeated conservative focus (and the near-universal media attack) on "the Biden inflation".

I'm not saying it is wrong to want to lower costs. I'm not saying the Biden inflation was good for anyone other than Donald Trump. But the post-pandemic inflation was the biggest economic problem we have faced in decades. And what did Kamala say? She said she wanted to lower costs. That was not a strong argument. It was more like an apology for what her boss did, as if Kamala herself blamed Biden for the inflation. No wonder she lost the election.

MSNBC's favorite word for Donald Trump is "chaos". But the Republican plan is far from chaos. Their plan is to cut federal spending. Everything Republicans do is part of the plan to cut federal spending. Seen in this light, the Republicans are far from chaotic. The opposition to vaccines and vaccinations, for example, will increase the death rate of elderly Americans, reduce the number of people receiving Social Security, and reduce federal spending on Social Security.

As a bonus, the spread of highly communicable, sometimes deadly diseases like COVID-19 and the flu will be far more rapid without vaccines -- particularly in areas of high population density such as cities. And cities are home to many more Democrats than Republicans. But ending vaccinations will help solve that problem for Republicans. 

And health care is just one aspect of their plan. Happy New Year.