Dean Baker is one of the few lonely folks who continues to hold out hope that the truth matters in our fallen age. I’m still with him, despite the abundant evidence that we’re both wrong, so here he is factchecking Donald Trump’s claim that he’s tough on drug companies and has cut prescription drug prices bigly. You will be unsurprised to know that the data shows otherwise. My added value in this is that I draw better charts than Dean, so here’s the growth in spending on prescription drugs over the past few years:

Even in an era of low inflation, we are being forced to pay more and more for prescription drugs. Donald Trump has done absolutely nothing to rein this in.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through August 28. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

As long as we’re taking a look at public opinion, here’s a remarkable turnaround:

Opposition to Obamacare Becomes Political Liability for GOP Incumbents

In the 2014 elections, Republicans rode a wave of anti-Affordable Care Act sentiment to pick up nine Senate seats, the largest gain for either party since 1980…Six years later, those senators are up for reelection. Not only is the law still around, but it’s gaining in popularity. What was once a winning strategy has become a political liability.

Public sentiment about the ACA, also known as Obamacare, has shifted considerably during the Trump administration after Republicans tried but failed to repeal it. Now, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis, which has led to the loss of jobs and health insurance for millions of people, health care again looks poised to be a key issue for voters this election.

The New York Times likewise reports that Republicans referred to Obamacare a grand total of once at this week’s convention, and Donald Trump didn’t mention it at all. However, this had nothing to do with not wanting to offend his audience of Republicans, who have given Obamacare a rock steady 75 percent unfavorable rating for the past decade. Rather, it had to do with not offending his TV audience, which included a lot of independents who have lately become far more favorable to Obamacare:

Among independents, Obamacare has gone from a net -11 percent unfavorable to +16 percent favorable over the past five years. That’s a tough trend for Republicans to fight. They might not need any Democratic votes to win elections, but they certainly need independent votes. It’s no wonder so many of them are keeping a low profile instead of loudly promising to repeal Obamacare.

This is exactly how I thought things would go with Obamacare: it would eventually be accepted as just another beloved social program, like Medicare and Social Security. I sure never expected it to take this long, though.

I had two pictures ready to go this week. One was of Hilbert and Hopper taken at my house. The other was of Stripey taken at my mother’s house. I asked her to make a totally unbiased choice of which picture to use, and she chose the picture of Stripey. “You never get to see the paws from underneath!” she gushed. Sure, mom. Totally unbiased.

A lot of people seem to be confused about exactly what the polls currently say about the presidential race. Just for the record, then, here’s a selection of projections constructed by Andrew Gelman and published by the Economist. The full set of projections is here. It’s a useful baseline for comparison to polls a week from now, which might give us some idea of whether either candidate benefited from a poll bounce.

Here’s an interesting thing. Using data from Missouri, a team of researchers looked into what happens when cities face a revenue squeeze. As you’ve always expected, one thing that happens is that cops write more tickets. Interestingly, though, they found that citation rates of Black and Latino drivers stayed about the same. It was only the citation rate of white drivers that went up:

This is interesting, but I think the authors’ interpretation is backward. In fact, the citation rate of white drivers barely changes at the zero point. What’s more noteworthy is that when times are flush (right side of chart) and police can afford to ease up, they ease up on white drivers but not Black or Latino drivers. (The full set of charts is here on p. 25.)

That’s my take, anyway. The authors suggest that when times are tough, cops focus on white drivers because they’re more likely to be affluent and therefore more likely to actually pay their fines. That may be. But when I look at this data without the distracting discontinuity overlay…

What I mostly see is a fairly simple story where there’s one weird outlier (bottom left) and the most obvious overall interpretation is that white drivers benefit from improved municipal revenue across the board, with nothing special happening at the zero point. The better things are, the more that white drivers are let off the hook. But only white drivers.

Of course, this whole thing would be moot if traffic fines weren’t used as revenue generators in the first place. “Policiteering,” as Jack Hitt dubbed it five years ago, was one of the key features of life in Ferguson, Missouri, before Michael Brown was shot and killed:

In 2010, this collaboration between the Ferguson police and the courts generated $1.4 million in income for the city. This year, they will more than double that amount—$3.1 million—providing nearly a quarter of the city’s $13 million budget, almost all of it extracted from its poorest African American citizens.

Is there any tax on the planet more regressive than this? It needs to end.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through August 27. It was pretty tough listening to Donald Trump brag last night about how he was practically a hero of the pandemic. Right now the COVID-19 death rate in the US is about three per million. That’s far higher than any peer country, all of whom adopted measures that eventually crushed the death rate nearly to zero. The only rich country that didn’t is us, because Trump couldn’t bring himself to wait one more month before reopening everything. One month. That’s all it would have taken.

If Trump had had the guts to do that, we too would have a death rate near zero. Tens of thousands of lives would have been saved. Kids would be going back to school—cautiously, carefully, but without fear. A huge number of small businesses and restaurants would have been saved from bankruptcy.

But Trump wouldn’t do it, and now we’re paying the price. Under the circumstances, you’d think he might at least be willing to get his party to agree to further aid for families who have lost their jobs because of the pandemic, but no. He’s not even willing to do that. He’s a monster.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

What is this? Hint: the obvious answer is wrong. It’s not a tennis ball. It’s also not a black-and-white image.

The Wall Street Journal says consumers have cut back on grocery purchases over the past month:

With Second Stimulus Checks on Hold, Americans Spend Less at the Grocery Store

Grocery shoppers are cutting back on spending, data show, a sign that Americans are hurting for cash as the federal unemployment stimulus remains on hold for most recipients.

…While sales of groceries, such as frozen dinners, cereal, soup and coffee, are still higher than they were a year ago, sales growth has slowed compared with July and prior months in the pandemic. Sales growth of frozen dinners, for instance, averaged about 9% for the three weeks ended Aug. 16, compared with around 17% for the previous two weeks, according to the IRI CPG Demand Index. Cereal sales, meanwhile, averaged a 2% increase the three weeks ended Aug. 16, compared with about 6% average growth the prior two weeks, the IRI data show.

Ahem. For starters, the BEA just released data for spending on groceries through the end of the second quarter. Here it is:

Spending on groceries skyrocketed during the first two quarters of the year thanks to more meals being eaten at home. It’s pretty obvious that this kind of growth couldn’t last forever, so of course it slowed down in August. It could hardly do anything else.

And despite the Journal’s headline, there’s no evidence that consumers are “cutting back on spending” at the grocery store. There is merely evidence that grocery sales aren’t growing as fast as they did earlier in the year. That’s a very different thing.

There’s little doubt that the end of unemployment bonuses affected spending on food and everything else starting in July. There’s also little doubt that spending on groceries will begin to fall as the country opens back up and spending on restaurant meals gets back to normal. But for now, none of that has happened. Consumers haven’t cut back on grocery purchases, they’ve just hit a new, higher plateau and are now spending at that level rather than continuing to grow forever. That’s all.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through August 26 The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.