Today will bring both paeans to the labor movement that used to be and sorrowful laments to the labor movement that’s nearly extinct today. But really, the entire story can be boiled down to a single chart:

If union density and income share had remained at their level of 50 years ago—before Reaganomics put an end to all that—working class households would be earning $10,000 more than they do now and middle-class households would be earning $15-20,000 more. That’s real money.

Instead it’s all been hoovered up by the top ten percent—and especially the top 1 percent—and there’s been no countervailing power big enough and powerful enough to keep the rich from taking it. And that’s just the way they like it.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 6. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Pool/Abaca via ZUMA

I predict that before long our postmaster general is going to rue the day he met Donald Trump:

Louis DeJoy’s prolific campaign fundraising, which helped position him as a top Republican power broker in North Carolina and ultimately as head of the U.S. Postal Service, was bolstered for more than a decade by a practice that left many employees feeling pressured to make political contributions to GOP candidates — money DeJoy later reimbursed through bonuses, former employees say.

Five people who worked for DeJoy’s former business, New Breed Logistics, say they were urged by DeJoy’s aides or by the chief executive himself to write checks and attend fundraisers at his 15,000-square-foot gated mansion beside a Greensboro, N.C., country club. There, events for Republicans running for the White House and Congress routinely fetched $100,000 or more apiece.

Pressuring employees to make donations and then reimbursing them is very, very illegal. Karen Tumulty, who has a long memory, reminds us of the many people who have gone to jail for doing this.

DeJoy denies all this, of course, but unlike so many stories of this nature this one has folks making allegations on the record. It’s going to play out a little differently than stories that depend solely on anonymous sources.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 5. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 4. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Last week the Economist poll had Joe Biden at 350 electoral votes and an 88 percent chance of winning. Today it has Biden at 334 electoral votes and an 83 percent chance of winning. It’s not a big change, but Donald Trump clearly closed his gap with Biden by a noticeable amount.

Here are Hilbert and Hopper keeping a keen eye on potential threats from the outside world. In this case I think it was a UPS truck dropping off some kind of non-cat food package for one of our neighbors. Not only a potential threat, then, but also kind of pointless, amirite?

A few days ago President Trump announced a moratorium on evictions through January. But what seems like an enormous relief to renters has two big  problems. First, although tenants had to make only partial payments (“as circumstance may permit”) to remain safe from eviction, the wording was a little unclear about what happens in January. Do you have to pay all the cumulative rent you owe in one lump sum? Do you get to repay it over time? Or do you not have to repay it at all? And what about interest and penalties? None of this was clear.

Second, the moratorium merely passes along the payment problem from tenants to landlords, who still have to pay the mortgage on their property even though they aren’t receiving enough rent to cover it. What happens when they go bankrupt?

An eviction moratorium is a fine idea, but the truth is that it’s only a band-aid. What’s really needed are cash payments to those out of work. That way, tenants can pay landlords and landlords can pay their mortgages. As you can see in the chart below, even with some recent improvement we still have about 12 million workers unemployed thanks to COVID-19. If we restored the $600 weekly unemployment bonus to these people, it would solve the eviction problem almost completely and would cost about $200 billion. That would be only a tenth of a rescue bill that clocked in at $2 trillion, which seems the most likely size if Republicans can ever stop fighting over it.

This is by far our most urgent priority. If we truly want to avoid an eviction armageddon, the only way to do it is by providing cash at the bottom of the pyramid. Then the renters can pay the landlords; the landlords can pay the bank; the bank can keep making loans; and investors can build more apartments. It’s the circle of life.

UPDATE: Charts are fine, but for a more personal and heartwrenching look at the cost of evictions, check out this CNN video:

CNN’s Kyung Lah speaks with residents in Houston who are facing financial hardship as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Unable to pay their rent, they now face eviction. https://t.co/uLdLoFTDEI pic.twitter.com/2o8zLGjKDq

— CNN Tonight (@CNNTonight) September 3, 2020

Every president promises to reduce the trade deficit, but few come through. The elder Bush did it and Barack Obama did it, but that’s it for the past six presidents. The rest of them just made it worse. In recent years, the trade deficit stayed steady during Obama’s second term at about -2.8 percent, but despite Trump’s widespread imposition of tariffs and his promise to reduce the trade deficit, he was unable to make a dent in it when he took over. In fact, the trade deficit is set to get worse this year, projected to finish at about -3 percent.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 3. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.