Judicial overreach: 3-judge panel invalidates 3 Texas congressional districts, 2 Republican, 1 Democrat

Never mind every congressional district in America is a joke.

There is no way one man or one woman can claim to represent the interests of 743,126.4 people, on average, as is the case now countrywide.

Texas has 36 men and women representing nearly 27 million in the US House, but 254 counties. Give Texas 254 seats in the House, and representation would increase to 106,299.2 Texans per member of Congress, on average. Who knows, the members of such a Congress might actually knock on your door every two years.

Do the same with the rest of the country and we could dispense with legislatures redrawing district lines every ten years after every Census, and more importantly with meddling courts trying to interfere in the politics of self-government.

The county system is ancient, venerable and stable. Black counties will have black representatives, Latino counties Latino representatives, and so on, just as it should be.

The time is long past to reform representation in the United States so that we actually get some for a change. Not coincidentally, that's the main impediment to it.

From the story here:

[T]he court ruled that the legislature drew the lines with “the intent and effect of diluting Latino voter opportunity.” ... [T]he court said the legislature used race to draw the lines, packing Democrats into the district and thereby diluting their voting power elsewhere. The court also ruled that the legislature pushed Hispanics into the district in an effort to defeat Doggett if a Hispanic candidate challenged him.

Congress sucks: Let's make it bigger!

As we all know, Congress sucks.

About only 17% of Americans approved of the Congress in 2016 according to Gallup, which is indicative of the historical lack of esteem for it. The average is just 31% approval since 1974. Real Clear Politics has its own tracker here, going back only to 2009. It is a composite of various polls, yielding an even lower average of 14.5% approval than Gallup's current 18%.

You get the idea. At best only about a third of the people approve of the job Congress is doing at any given time. And the top reasons given are 1) gridlock, bickering, not compromising and 2) not getting anything done, not making decisions.

So why make Congress bigger?

In a word, to make it more representative, end the gridlock and get something done.

In short, make Congress overwhelmingly Republican . . . because the country is.

Currently, just 435 congressmen and women represent districts unnaturally carved out of America's 3,144 counties, parishes, boroughs, census areas, independent cities and the District of Columbia.

I say unnaturally carved out because after every census the gerrymandering fight begins to redraw the congressional district lines to favor incumbents of the party in power whose boundaries transgress all over those counties, parishes, boroughs, census areas, independent cities and DC.

We've already got all these boundaries and units that go back to the beginning of the country in many cases, so we don't need these 435 fake Congressional districts anymore.

My own county with a population of just over 600,000 is carved up by two congressmen who each represent over 700,000 spanning many other counties. That doesn't make any sense.

The constitution never intended this.

It intended representation to grow with population, but in the 1920s Congress saw a loophole and fixed representation at the then current 435. There's nothing magic about 435. Why not 439? 394? 943? Did Moses decree 435? George Washington? The founders never settled the question, but they never intended representation to stop growing with population. If we followed an early formula, we'd have one Congressman for every 50,000 people. That would mean 6,473 in the US House today!

Ever since the 1920s we've been treated to an increase in oligarchy where just 218 votes are needed to ram something down the throats of more and more people.

You know, like Obamacare, which was passed without a single Republican vote.

Meanwhile Republicans just showed that they own the grassroots politically, winning the counties 2623 to 489. Here's the map that shows that, from brilliant maps dot com:

If you want to end the gridlock and get something done, reform the Congress to represent the country for a change. Abolish the Congressional districts, and elect representatives to the US House from every county across this land.

You say you want a revolution . . ..

With 21 days to go to election day, Clinton is still winning in the Electoral College but by 6% fewer EC votes than last week

Last week the Real Clear Politics Electoral College map and the polling in the Toss-ups indicated a Clinton win 339-199.

Now with three weeks to go to election day Hillary's advantage has shrunk by 6%, now winning 321-217, and Trump is up by 9%.

Clinton today has 256 EC votes including 9 states which only lean her way.

Trump has 170 EC votes including 5 states which only lean his way.

ME-2 (+5.4) with 1 EC vote is in Trump's column, ME-1 (+19) with 1 EC vote is in Hillary's column.

Polling in the Toss-ups as of this hour has NV in the Clinton column by +2.5, MN by +4.3, NH by +3.6, NC by +2.7, and FL by +3.6. Her average lead is +3.3.

Libertarian Gary Johnson polls an average of 5.9 in these Clinton Toss-up states, in every case out-polling Clinton's actual leading margins, arguably helping Clinton win them. Green Party candidate Jill Stein polls 2.0 in MN, 2.0 in NH, and 1.4 in FL.

And in the Trump column are Toss-ups AZ by +1, IA by +3.7, IN by +4.5, and OH by +0.7. His average lead is +2.5.

Green Party candidate Jill Stein polls 1.5 in AZ, 1.7 in IA, and 2.3 in OH. Arguably Trump is winning in AZ and OH with Stein's help. Johnson polls 8.5 in AZ, 8.3 in IA, 10.0 in IN, and 6.5 in OH.

Overall Gary Johnson is polling an average of 7.0 in the nine Toss-up states and Stein an average of 1.8 in six of them compared with a combined average lead for Clinton or Trump of only 3.0.

Does the Libertarian Party or the Green Party have representation in Congress? If they're not a phenomenon of the people, maybe those parties shouldn't be allowed to spoil presidential elections by running candidates in the first place.

I still haven't heard a single Tea Partier demand representation at 1:15,000, let alone 1:30,000

Which their holy, sacred Constitution alternately forbids and enjoins in Article I., Section 2:

"The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand . . .."

Crazy WaPo article portrays middle class as complete creature of government spending

Here, focusing on the anecdotal history of the middle class in Downey, California, where the removal of spending on the space program has hit particularly hard.

Just the sort of deliberate Keynesian propaganda you would expect from The Washington Post, where you will also find narry a word mentioned about how America's turnabout to free-trade fanaticism during the 1960s started the wholesale export abroad of good-paying middle class jobs, the dearth of which now is our present predicament.

The sickness of Republicanism in the present liberal era has been how ready it has been to participate in profiting from the export of these jobs, and by masking how the middle class was being gutted by providing transfer payments to them, for example, in the form of tax credits.

If there's every been a time for a middle class rebellion in America, this is it. Unfortunately, so many of the middle class are now in the lower class that, if a revolt comes, it will be studiously lied about by the profiteering elites of both parties as a dangerous, left-wing proletarian revolution.

There is a way to take the country back which is not violent, however, but it requires Americans to demand the representation which they do not enjoy. It requires a transformation of their vision in conformity with a constitution which never imagined there was anything sacrosanct about the number "435". 

Republicans stopped growth of representation in the 1920s: Why isn't fixing that the Tea Party's job one?

From the Wikipedia article, here:

In 1921, Congress failed to reapportion the House membership as required by the United States Constitution. This failure to reapportion may have been politically motivated, as the newly elected Republican majority may have feared the effect such a reapportionment would have on their future electoral prospects. Then in 1929 Congress (Republican control of both houses of congress and the presidency) passed the Reapportionment Act of 1929 which capped the size of the House at 435 (the then current number). This cap has remained unchanged for more than eight decades. Three states – Wyoming, Vermont, and North Dakota – have populations smaller than the average for a single district.

The "ideal" number of members has been a contentious issue since the country's founding. George Washington agreed that the original representation proposed during the Constitutional Convention (one representative for every 40,000) was inadequate and supported an alteration to reduce that number to 30,000. This was the only time that Washington pronounced an opinion on any of the actual issues debated during the entire convention.

In Federalist No. 55, James Madison argued that the size of the House of Representatives has to balance the ability of the body to legislate with the need for legislators to have a relationship close enough to the people to understand their local circumstances, that such representatives' social class be low enough to sympathize with the feelings of the mass of the people, and that their power be diluted enough to limit their abuse of the public trust and interests.

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All the ancient American debates about this issue argue over ratios of 1 representative for every 15,000 or 30,000 or 40,000 or 50,000 of population. But today because of what the Republicans did in the 1920s, arresting growth of representation and fixing the number at 435, the ratio has soared to 1 for every 728,000!

If you wonder why your representative doesn't represent you today, that is why. He or she doesn't know who you are, or care.

If you want to fix America, fix that. We could start by doubling the size of the House, which means halving all the districts.

That sound you're hearing right now is Congressmen everywhere shitting their pants.

Americans believe the most important problem facing the country involves representation, but don't say it quite that way

Dissatisfaction with the government, Congress and politicians took first place in a January Gallup poll. This includes dissatisfaction with poor leadership, corruption and abuse of power.

Perhaps if someone explained how too much power is concentrated there in too few hands the American people might be persuaded that more representatives with smaller districts might help solve the problem of our oligarchical Congress and improve its responsiveness to the people.

Results here.







h/t Laura Ingraham

Obsessed with Congress' flaws, Justin Amash finds himself alienated from Republicans as a libertarian crank

The Detroit News here highlights how in "Michigan GOP leaves Justin Amash to fend for himself", including this from Mike Rogers who evidently feels more free to speak because he's baggin' it:

Rogers has sparred with Amash on foreign policy intervention and fought off an Amash attempt last year to curb the National Security Agency phone surveillance program. Rogers points to Amash’s lack of support on Iran sanctions, a vote against a balanced budget amendment and the “embrace” of isolationism that’s “not consistent with what’s in the best interest of the future of the United States. I just worry you have somebody who’s more concerned about their brand than the substance of the issues,” Rogers said.

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Congress' flaws are legion, but their remedy is not libertarianism. Their remedy is in representation.

In his zeal for the constitution Justin Amash has little to say about representation, perhaps because he represents the libertarian interests of a few, not the broader interests of his constituents. Which is odd, since lack of representation was the key complaint of the founding era which wrote it.

Today we have a Congress which is an artifact of the 1920s, not of the founding era. Representation has ceased to grow with population since the 1920 Census, by an act of Congress itself, the effect of which has been to turn the Congress into a powerful oligarchy arrayed against the great masses of the unwashed taxpayers whose wallets are plundered by it.

The Tea Party would be more convincing if it actually believed in a more representative Congress, which means a far more numerous Congress than the 435 member one we have now. So far we haven't seen the Tea Party demonstrate passion for any such thing, even from its preeminent leaders like Justin Amash who claim to be inspired by everything constitutional, except for representation at the level of one per 30,000.

Americans hate their Congress in unprecedented numbers, and the reason is because their individual representatives don't speak for them.

If the Tea Party had any genuineness to it, it would make fixing that job #1. 

Matthew Continetti Thinks He Ought To Hear One Of The Oligarchs Complain About The Oligarchy

Here, in The Washington Free Beacon:

If the business editors of the [New York] Times were aware of the irony of lamenting the political influence of great wealth on one half of their page while handling it with kid gloves on the other, they gave no sign. “Mr. Cohen says he understands the criticism that he has access most citizens do not,” says the article, before handing Cohen the microphone. “But I also don’t believe in unilateral disarmament,” he said. Two paragraphs earlier, he had said, “My priorities in political giving are Comcast priorities. I don’t kid myself. My goals are to support the interests of the company.”

There you have it: A wealthy Democratic donor admits he funds candidates to improve his bottom line. And yet I hear from the Senate floor no denunciations of his attempts to buy American democracy, no labeling of him as un-American. I have not received a piece of direct mail soliciting donations to fight David L. Cohen’s hijacking of the political process, nor do I wake up every day to investigations of the Cohen political and charitable network. Why?

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Matthew needs to re-read that George Orwell line with which he starts the story, get his nose out of the Times and aim it in the direction of the Congress:

“To see what is in front of one’s nose,” George Orwell famously wrote, “needs a constant struggle.” 

I'll say.

The whole point of representation is that it be adequate to the task of balancing the influence of competing interests which all from time to time display the same shortcomings of human nature. Continetti's faith in the goodness of the Senate is shockingly naive. It especially misses the fact that the oligarchy it itself constitutes works hand in glove with the oligarchy of business by which it was captured long ago after state legislatures lost their right of electing them. The founders wanted the Senate to be an oligarchy of the interests of the states qua states, balanced by a House of the people which grew in size as the country did, but we willingly gave that up long ago when Senators became popularly elected and Congressmen fixed their number based on the population level of the 1920 US Census. Now every important issue hangs in the balance depending on what just one or two men or women can do in government, as when a Biden, a McConnell or a Boehner, a Pelosi or a Reid brokers some deal to get legislation passed. And almost always bad legislation.

Talk about oligarchy. Wherever two or three are gathered together in the name of government these days, there is one.

It is counterintuitive that in order for the people to have more control of their government, government has to be bigger, just not the part that's already too big, which it is precisely because the part that isn't anywhere near big enough is as small as it is.

Repeal the 17th Amendment, and expand the US House to its constitutional proportions: 10,566. It won't be perfect. It's not a panacea. Some measure will have to be taken to preclude the House and Senate from doing what they did before in concentrating power in their few hands. But there is no other alternative if we are to rescue ourselves from the miserable few who now tyrannize us routinely, as with ObamaCare. If we don't, the next step is a true tyranny of one.

Princeton/Northwestern study concludes business has representation but Americans do not

Here, where however there isn't the slightest suggestion that increasing representation for the majority of citizens by restoring the size of US House to its constitutionally intended proportions might help mitigate the problem:

The US government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country's citizens, but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful, a new study from Princeton and Northwestern Universities has concluded. ... Researchers concluded that US government policies rarely align with the the preferences of the majority of Americans, but do favour special interests and lobbying organisations: "When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it." ... The theory of "biased pluralism" that the Princeton and Northwestern researchers believe the US system fits holds that policy outcomes "tend to tilt towards the wishes of corporations and business and professional associations."

h/t Business Insider

Sean Trende Calls For A Larger US House But Never Mentions The Actual Language Of The Constitution

In "It's Time To Increase The Size Of The US House", here, Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics makes many of the same points we have made about the sorry state of representation in these United States, including the importance of the "unratified" Article the First as the real First Amendment as opposed to the mythology which has grown up around the default one.

As Trende ably shows, Article the First would have fixed representation eventually at 1 US representative for every 50,000 of population. He appears horrified, however, at the prospect of a Congress of 6,100 representatives today.

Is that why he never mentions Article I Section 1 of the actual constitution which is ratified and under which we are supposed to operate?

"The number of representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand . . .."

If 6,100 representatives is horrifying, the 10,533 representatives we should have according to the spirit of the actual constitution is downright heart-stopping. I can understand Trende not talking about this, but how come the Tea Party never does? After all, they carry the constitution around with them pretty much everywhere and are supposed to be the quintessential originalists these days, second only to Antonin Scalia.

This was the language Article the First was supposed to remedy. But as it stands, the constitution was ratified with this loophole specifying how many representatives we may not have, but not how many we should. As a consequence, when the light finally dawned on the dimwits in Congress in the 1920s that they could fix representation at the then current 435, they set up for themselves quite the little oligarchy of power, influence and corruption, and representation ceased to expand ever since. And along with that expanded our discontent.

That's why your congressmen doesn't know your name nor the name of the other 728,000 average constituents in his district. Nor does he care to. The only name in his Rolodex (sorry, I'm dating myself) is the Club for Growth or some such "org".

It's also why we have the other problems Trende mentions: malapportionment as in Montana, gerrymandering of the most unnatural sort just about everywhere, underrepresented minority enclaves and rural areas, and the expensive bought and paid for campaigns which depend on mostly outside money.

Trende mentions the British House of Commons has more representatives than we do, but the irony that they are better represented than we are never dawns on him. Nor does Trende mention New Hampshire. They have 400 in their House, a ratio of 1:3300.

America should be more like New Hampshire.  

The Odds Of Winning Lotto Are About 20% Better Than Your Congressman Knowing Your Name

In Michigan your best odds of winning a lotto jackpot are in the game named "Fantasy Five". Your odds of winning are about 1:575,757.

The likelihood your congressman knows your name on average in the United States today are 1:728,712 (316.99 million current population divided by 435 members of the US House).

So your lotto odds are about 20% better than your representation odds.

If we followed the constitution, however, and had the representation it prescribes (1:30,000), your representation odds would improve almost 96% instantly (10,566 members of the US House).

Now there's an instant game we can all play.

Roll Call Magazine's 218 Blog Embraces The Oligarchy

"218: Because it's the only number that really matters in the US House."

Yeah, and that's the problem.

Current population: 316.8 million.

Implied representation on the constitutional formula rejected by the anti-Federalists: 10,560 US Representatives in the US House.

Preferred level: 21,120 in the US House. Let 'em camp in tents on FedEx Field.

Article The First, The Never-Adopted First Amendment, Sought To Increase Federal Representation Naturally

Your Congressman doesn't even know your name? Maybe there aren't enough of them, which is to say he or she represents too many people to represent you, so that we have representation without representation.

The first first amendment, Article I., sought to prevent this:

"After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred representatives, nor less than one representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than two hundred representatives, nor more than one representative for every fifty thousand persons."

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Ratified by many states but never adopted, the constitution ended up with different, open-ended language, which a later act of the Congress of the United States interfered with in the 1920s, fixing representation instead of letting it continue to grow with population:

"The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand . . .."

On this language we should have 10,490 representatives, not a fixed 435 (one for every seven hundred twenty-three Thousand at present). But on the language of Article the First, we might have had only 6,294 representatives.

The anti-federalists, however, who insisted on a bill of rights, couldn't imagine such numbers to be at all adequate to represent the people, and some of them called for one for every fifteen Thousand, which would have meant an astounding 20,979 federal representatives today.

Contrast such levels of representation with actual total representation in state legislatures in the US today (as of March 2013): 5,411, which represents a ratio of one for every fifty-eight Thousand. Clearly state government representation today, taken overall, most clearly approximates the levels of representation called for by the un-adopted Article the First for federal representation.

That said, residents of New Hampshire, with 400 representatives, are the best represented in the nation, at a ratio of one for every 3,302!

And Californians are among the worst represented with just 80 representatives to the state legislature, a ratio of one for every 475,518.

Once Again, It's The Banks Doing The Money Printing, And The Bubble Blowing, Not The Feds

Jeffrey Snider, here:

That is not to say that paper dollars are issued by banks; they are not. Paper currency still takes the form of Federal Reserve Notes, but in the marginal monetary and banking system they are largely irrelevant. Dollars in the banking system, what is called liquidity, are created and dispersed by bank balance sheet accounting. These marginal liquidity units are digital representations of currency, ledger balances that shift daily, even by the minute. Bankruptcy and insolvency are not when you run out of Federal Reserve Notes in your bank vault, they come when you have to settle your accounts with the liquidity provider and there are no positive numbers on the right side of the computerized ledger (or when your ledger does not match your counterparty's, and that counterparty happens to be JP Morgan).

Given that global banks are the primary "money printers" in the dollar trade system (and the dollar swap standard), the Fed's role under interest rate targeting is to backstop the wholesale money markets where banks obtain short-term funding from each other. The implicit promise of interest rate targeting had been enough for the global dollar fraction to expand through accounting, regulatory and derivative leverage, providing the financing for the myriad bubbles of recent decades. The Fed did not create the bubbles directly, just provided the conditions for banks to do it for them.

In 2011 Head Of FISA Court Ruled NSA Had Already Lied To It Three Times

No wonder Snowden got fed up and blew the whistle.

The New York Times reports here:

The Justice Department had told Judge Bates that N.S.A. officials had discovered that the program had also been gathering domestic messages for three years. Judge Bates found that the agency had violated the Constitution and declared the problems part of a pattern of misrepresentation by agency officials in submissions to the secret court. ... “The court is troubled that the government’s revelations regarding N.S.A.’s acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program,” Judge Bates wrote.

Rush Limbaugh Finds A GDP Conspiracy Where There Is None

When it comes to numbers, I have observed that Rush Limbaugh can be counted on to get something horribly wrong, and today was no exception. Today he has misrepresented the routine revision of the GDP data every five years as a revision of the numbers for only the last five years, as if it were designed specifically to make Obama look better. In actual fact, the revision of the numbers goes back not five years, but all the way back to 1929.

Truly incredible, and embarrassing in the extreme, since the truth is the revision occurs every five years, and this is the 14th revision in the series. This is why conservatives hope Rush retires soon, nevermind why liberals hope he retires. He's making us all look stupid when he carries on like this.

I have shown "five" in red below from today's Rush transcript so you can appreciate the thorough-going depth of Rush's misrepresentation of the facts: 

RUSH:  Here's what the Commerce Department is doing. 

They have "made changes to how it calculates gross domestic product," going back five years. "At the same time, the government also went back and revised data for the past five years, to reflect more complete as well as additional statistics from a variety of sources, such as the Internal Revenue Service and the US Department of Agriculture." They have made changes to how they're calculating the gross domestic product, or economic growth, and what they're doing now is they're going back five years. 

They have revised data for the past five years to, they say, "reflect a more complete, as well as additional statistics from a variety of sources, such as the IRS and the Department of Agriculture.  Why do you think they decided to go back the last five years to revise data?  To rewrite the horrible 4-1/2 years of Obama.  There's no question.  I don't know if it's fraudulent, but they're cooking the books -- and after cooking the books, after making it look as good as they can, it's 1.7% economic growth.

Here, however, is the statement from the BEA in today's official release about the routine revision every five years, which has been telegraphed to every reader of BEA GDP reports for many quarters running going back at least to last year (meaning Rush Limbaugh has never read even cursorily a single one of those GDP reports from the BEA in the interim, let alone today's):

Today, BEA released revised statistics of gross domestic product (GDP) and of other national income and product accounts (NIPAs) series from 1929 through the first quarter of 2013. Comprehensive revisions, which are carried out about every 5 years, are an important part of BEA's regular process for improving and modernizing its accounts to keep pace with the ever-changing U.S. economy.

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1.7% GDP in Q2 2013 is horrible enough, but the average report for the last three quarters comes in under 1%, 0.966% to be exact. So if there is some conspiracy to make things look better than they are, whoever's in charge of that ought to be fired, stat!

This country remains in deep trouble, and there is no conspiracy to hide it. 

Dear Christopher Buckley: "Go Away" Is Not A Solution, Unless You're A WASP

Occupy Wall Street: The Mirror Image Of Congress

Reviewing "This Town" by Mark Leibovich in The New York Times, here, Christopher Buckley wishes in the end that most of the denizens of DC would just go home or, better yet, go away, citing the important fact that the lobbyists are really mostly just former elected officials:

'There’s a phrase in journalism-speak called “burying the lede,” which Leibo­vich appears to do by waiting until Page 330 to cite this arresting figure (previously reported by The Atlantic): in 1974, 3 percent of retiring members of Congress became lobbyists. “Now 50 percent of senators and 42 percent of congressmen do.” No one goes home anymore. Cincinnatus, call your office. ... By the end, one is left thinking that our country would be so much better off if, after putting in their years of “public service,” all these people would just go home. Or just away. But then what would we do for entertainment, being left with a mere Parliament of Bores?'

When the US Congress and the executive conspired way back in the 1920s to restrict representation to 435 in the US House to repress the growing political influence of the grown large immigrant population, mostly from Europe, which they also evidently wished "would just go home" or "away", it merely pushed on a string. So that today instead of worse representation we have representation of the worst sort: lobbyists whom we cannot dislodge at election time, and the 435 people who depend on them for campaign financing whom we cannot dislodge, either.

Today we should have a US House of Representatives of 10,490. Instead we had in 2012 12,411 registered lobbyists, and the 435 mopes the lobbyists, and we, routinely return to Washington, DC.

Representation is messy, but we desperately need more of it as the founders intended, not less.

Depression In Real Retail Sales Finally Ends, Beats Old 2006 High

The old high in Dec. 2006 was $180.016 billion. The depression low was $155.927 billion in March 2009, a decline of 13.4% in inflation adjusted retail sales. The new real gain in monthly retail sales, however, is barely $350 million, with an "m".

It remains to be seen if the new higher level of real retail sales can be sustained with increased payroll taxes factored in, presumably taking money out of retail circulation. Velocity of M2 and MZM were already at historic lows in Q4 2012 in the post-war period at the temporary lower payroll tax rate.

Gasoline prices were last consistently below $3.00 a gallon in 2010 and since then have averaged about $3.50 a gallon. At roughly 10% of total retail, sudden spikes in gasoline prices can produce expenditure on gasoline which represents a phantom increase to sales, and also mask the fact that miles-traveled remain in depression, a more concrete, so to speak, decline in velocity caused chiefly by enduring low employment by historical measures.

Update, 4-15-13: While the above graph shows real retail, that is, retail level adjusted for inflation, I have found a better representation of reality by Doug Short, reproduced and referenced here, which also adjusts for population growth and removes gasoline because it is really a form of taxation which obscures the underlying level of true retail activity. Bottom line: real retail is actually still about 8% off the 2005 high measured the same way.

Michigan Gov. Snyder Is 83% Correct On Ballot Proposals

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is 83% correct on the 6 ballot proposals facing voters in Tuesday's elections. He's against all of them except Number 1, the emergency manager law, according to this story in the Detroit Free Press, here:

A gubernatorial bus tour hit Sterling Heights today to reinforce Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder's message to vote yes on Proposal 1, no on the rest. ... Proposal 1 asks if the emergency manager law should stay in place. Proposal 2-6 are constitutional amendments that would protect collective bargaining, require utilities to use more renewable energy, put union rights in place for home health care workers, require a two-thirds vote in the legislature for any tax changes and require a vote of the people before an international bridge or tunnel could be built.

Amending the constitution is simply a way for legislators to avoid responsibility for taking a stand on these issues. And Michiganders seem hell bent on helping them do just that when they already have the option of punishing representatives at the polls for voting contrary to their wishes on the matters. They should exercise that option. If government isn't representing the people to their satisfaction, I suggest increasing representation, not sabotaging it by making such representation as we have even less representative by going over its head. Amending the constitution over and over again is nuclear warfare against our form of government.

The first proposal is really the same sort of thing, but if the voters really hate the emergency manager law then they should throw the bums out who passed it. Going over their heads to a ballot proposal really takes the heat off of them when it should really be on them all the more if it's such a bad law.

I happen to think it's a bad law, but I'd rather vote against my representatives who passed it.

Unfortunately, the horse is already out of the barn on this one.