Recent professional interest in rating U.S. presidents dates from the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., poll of 1948. Schlesinger solicited the opinions of fifty-five "experts," the majority of whom were professional historians. The findings were subsequently published in Life magazine and were quickly embraced by the press as representing the collective judgment of historians everywhere. Schlesinger repeated the exercise fourteen years later, this time surveying seventy-five experts.

In both those polls the top five ranking presidents were Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Thomas Jefferson. The bottom two were Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding.

Respondents to this year’s survey included current and recent members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association as well as scholars who had recently published peer-reviewed academic research in key related scholarly journals or academic presses. 525 respondents were invited to participate, and 154 usable responses were received, yielding a 29.3% response rate.

On the survey's 0-100 scale of "overall greatness," a rating of 50 means a president was average, while zero means a president is considered a failure. Only the top three presidents — Abraham Lincoln at No. 1, followed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and then George Washington — scored above 90. The drop-off was sharp from there, with no one else above an 80 rating. Roughly half the presidents were rated below 50.

The results of this year’s ranking are similar to the results from previous surveys. Abraham Lincoln again tops the list (95.03 average), followed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (90.83), George Washington (90.32), Teddy Roosevelt (78.58), Thomas Jefferson (77.53), Harry Truman (75.34), Barack Obama (73.8), and Dwight Eisenhower (73.73).

The most notable changes in this ordering are Franklin Delano Roosevelt moving up to #2 from the third spot last year, and Dwight Eisenhower falling back to #8 from #6 last year. The bottom of the rankings is also relatively stable. Donald Trump rates lowest (10.92), behind James Buchanan (16.71), Andrew Johnson (21.56), Franklin Pierce (24.6), William Henry Harrison (26.01), and Warren Harding (27.76).

"While partisanship and ideology don't tend to make a major difference overall, there are a few distinctions worth noting," said political scientists Brandon Rottinghaus of the University of Houston and Justin S. Vaughn of Coastal Carolina University, who managed this year's survey as those in 2015 and 2018. “Experts who self-identified as conservatives rated President Joe Biden No. 30, while liberals put him 13th and moderates ranked him 20th. All three of those same groups ranked Donald Trump, whose presidency was marked by his flouting of historical norms, in the bottom five.”

"There are also other president assessments where partisan polarization is evident — Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Obama, and Biden — but interestingly not for Bill Clinton," the survey's authors said. Thirsty for more? The following two links are for, respectively, the NPR news posting describing the survey ("In historians' Presidents Day survey, Biden vs. Trump is not a close call") and a white paper by the survey directors ("Official Results of the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey") which includes the ratings and rankings for all 45 presidents.

More specifically, have you ever thought of using freight-car loading statistics as a reliable predictor of whither and how far those topsy-turvy stock indexes, and and their component parts, are likely to go, with your 401k in tow, in the near future?

If you have, you're in good company. That Sage of Wall Street, Warren Buffett, is on record as saying freight car loadings are his favorite economic indicator: Maybe that's why he owns one of America's leading railroads. So if you haven't, maybe you should.

In an interview, Buffett was asked to identify the single most important economic statistic he would choose if he was stranded on a desert island for a month and could only get one set of economic numbers. Buffett answered that his “desert island indicator” would be freight car loadings. He would argue that freight car loadings measure the amount of raw materials, inputs, and supplies moving around the country every week, and this should be predictive of the future direction of the overall economy.

You probably think of rail as a relic from our not-so-recent past. But while the time has passed when railroading was America’s largest industry (think early 20th century), mile-long freight trains remain both a common sight in certain parts of the country and a key cog in the national economy. About 40% of all our transported goods still travel by rail, more than any other form of transport. And that’s up from 27% in 1980. Overall rail industry revenues topped $70 billion last year. So there’s certainly something to track there.

Buffet usually makes a lot of sense. Rail car loadings obviously mirror the country’s production of goods and move with it. That production in turn reflects customer demand and, likewise, moves with it. And customer demand reflects what kind of money businesses and the public have to throw around. Things go up when people are making money, or at least think they are, and have reasons to spend it, on everything from dinner out to restocking inventory.

Yardeni Research, a consulting firm specializing in global investment strategy and asset allocation, recently published a booklet (viewable online: www.yardeni.com) highlighting the correlation between rail car loadings and the direction of the economy. It showcases 25 different charts dimensioning rail car loadings and the correlation to economic activity. The parallels are eye-opening.

One small caveat. Apparently, the folks doing rail car analysis in the ‘20s failed to foresee the severity of the oncoming Great Depression. Missed it entirely, in fact. Mild slowdown. In fairness, that could have been more likely attributed to operator error than any weakness of their methodology. Almost everybody failed to see the flashing red lights that preceded the Crash.

It was a period of some of the most short-sighted, over-optimistic thinking in our nation’s history. All the financial touts and their analytical elves were napping on the railroad tracks even as the crossing gates were coming down on top of them. The same kind of behavior that Allan Greenspan, who predicted the Great Recession of 2008, presciently characterized in the late ‘90s as “irrational exuberance." Ah, those French. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

The best tools in the world will fail in the hands of people who don’t really know how to use them. But go ahead, take a shot. If nothing else is working for you?

If you should find yourself down by the station (the one near your broker) early in the morning one of these days, don't be surprised if you hear an echoing refrain of that old conductor's call just before things start moving again: All aboard!

And then go ahead, take a ride on the Reading, just like when you were a kid playing Monopoly. What have you got to lose? At worst, a few hotels.

“I sincerely believe that with today’s actions, Farmers Insurance is well on its way to becoming the Bud Light of insurance,” he said in a statement posted to Twitter.

Whatever, they've got company. The Council on Foreign Relations reported in August that American homeowners, already coping with lousy weather, face an even bigger risk: disappearing property insurance. Private companies are reducing the storm coverage they sell in some states or even withdrawing entirely, concluding that potential losses outweigh probable profits. And in many other states, they have substantially increased the price of the coverage they do offer and not writing new policies.

Eric Andersen, president of of Aon PLC, one of the world’s largest insurance brokers, told a Senate committee in March that climate change is "injecting uncertainty into an industry built on risk prediction and has created a crisis of confidence around the ability to predict losses." He added that reinsurers like Lloyds of London (the companies that insure insurance companies against excessive losses) “have been withdrawing from high-risk areas, around wildfire and flood in particular,”

John McColgan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Rising sea levels, severe heat waves, drought, monsoon-like rainfall and all-around more powerful storms are making natural disasters more intense and more frequent, worldwide.Between 1980 and 2021, the U.S. suffered 7 or 8 natural disasters per year, on average. In 2023, with months to go before year-end, the U.S. has set a new record for super-expensive weather disasters, with 23 climate catastrophes and weather events costing at least $1 billion, as of the end of August. That breaks the record of 22 set in all of 2020, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This year's disasters so far have cost more than $57.6 billion and killed 253 people.

But Jimmy Patronis, and others so inclined, needn't fret over the amount of steel in Farmers Insurance's spine or that of the industry as a whole. Insurance is a lot like the mob. They're pretty open-minded, you might even say humorless. And "woke" only in the original sense of the word. That is, they pay very close attention. They'll insure just about anyone and anything for the right price. They don't care about your politics or your social values or the plethora of passing popular mores you're caught up in. They do insist you pay them first, and (this is important) they simply refuse to lose money on your behalf. Their costs go up, your costs will go up. And if the calculations get too out of whack, they will drop you like a cheap hood with his feet encased in cement. No hard feelings.

Hurricane Sally on Sept. 16, 2020. Image by NOAA

In pure fact, they probably don't even give much of a damn about global warming or climate change or whatever you like to call it. (And they don't worry too much about what you call them either.) They watch the weather and they watch the trendlines, and most of all they watch the bottom line. You can live pretty much the way you want, acknowledge or not acknowledge what pleases your precious sense of priorities or the cherished beliefs passed down from generation to generation in your family.

More than religion, more than politics, more than love and hate, the insurance industry, just like the mob, will lead you in the long term to the truth. But it's going to cost you. So stop whining (They hate that) and pony up when they tell you, and meantime see if there aren't a few things you could maybe invest in on your own to help yourself with your situation. What the hell? You're going to be spending that money anyway, one way or the other. Capisce?

Eric Levitz, writing for the Intelligencer website (an offshoot of New York magazine), points out the following in "Biden’s Unpopularity Is More Mysterious Than It Looks".

America’s unemployment rate is hovering at historic lows. The percentage of prime-age Americans in the labor force is higher than it’s been since the 2008 financial crisis. Lower-income workers have recovered roughly 25 percent of the increase in wage inequality that accrued between Ronald Reagan’s election and Biden’s. Inflation is falling. A gallon of gasoline costs roughly 30 percent less than it did one year ago.

Manufacturing-plant construction has doubled since the end of 2021, and real spending on the forms of manufacturing most incentivized by the president’s CHIPS law and Inflation Reduction Act — computer, electronics, and electrical production — has nearly quadrupled over the past year. His policies have lowered prescription-drug costs for seniors and health-insurance premiums for those who purchase coverage over the individual market.

And a recent AP-NORC Center poll finds only one-third of voters approve of Biden’s handling of the economy.

Is he right? What gives? For all Biden's done, in just two and a half years, is this all the thanks he gets? Well, maybe it is. He's the president, after all, and people often don't think much of presidents, at least not lately. Buyers' remorse starts setting in within days after the votes are counted. (They liked him well enough before they elected him, you will recall.)

That’s why being president is such a crummy job. Apparently nobody likes you for long no matter what you do for them. Welcome to the club, Joe.

President Biden's approval rating after 919 days in office compared with past presidents

FiveThirtyEight

Truth is, while Biden's approval rating is lower than every president's going back to Reagan, it's only lower by the slightest little bit. After 919 days in office, he's a mere one point behind where Trump was at the same stage of his term. Four and a half points behind Obama. Six points behind Clinton. Two points behind Reagan, possibly the most likeable man ever elected president.

Both Bushes buried Biden. At this point in his presidency, he's 15 points behind Bush 43 and almost 80 behind Bush senior. But those guys were coming off 9/11 and Desert Storm respectively. They scored at their zeniths the highest presidential approval ratings in modern history.

George W. left office with an approval rating of only 22%. And Bush H.W. in time dropped down into the 30% range and then failed to get reelected.

Commander and Commander in Chief

Why do you think his dog is biting everyone? He's getting back at us, one voter at a time. You can keep the dog, Joe. Just get a sign.

The Conference Board, a non-partisan think tank, conducts a Consumer Confidence Survey each month to examine the public's attitude toward business and financial conditions in the present as well as their outlook for likely developments in the months ahead. It probes buying intentions, vacation plans, and consumer expectations for inflation, stock prices, and interest rates now and in the near future. They've been asking basically the same questions now for 41 years.

Over most of the reports in the past nine months, attitudes about the present situation have moved basically positively against their baseline. But when it comes to future expectations, feelings tend to run in just the opposite direction.

The competing trends are hardly dramatic, but they are clearly discernable. In other words, just now we feel all right, but looking down the road we see trouble. Same story, month after month. The future when it gets here is not nearly as bad as expected, yet the future stays grim. The overall, composite confidence level stays fairly flat month to month, up or down just a few points each time.

Possibly those two metrics might be just the right position to take. Inflation fears. Persistent recession worries. Tight labor environment. Despair over voter animosity. The persistant rants of obsessive conspiracy enthusiasts. Doubts about of the ability of elected officials to stop disparaging each other long enough to do anything good in the legislative arena, or even to do much of anything at all. Maybe there's cold comfort in holding low expectations.

A classic cartoon chestnut from the 1930s somewhat presciently captured this kind of national malaise, if in somewhat cartoonish style. (However, its proposed remedy remains beyond our present technological grasp.) "Sunshine Makers" (Van Beuren Studio, 1935). It strikes a chord. A cartoon of probably unsurprising introspection for the '30s.

You watch? Looks just like Congress, no? Evidently we're mainly gnomes in the present tense, but in the future tense we turn into goblins.

Wonkier readers will have little time for frivolous comedy and cartoon messages from the Thirties, and will probably rather hear how the CCI Index actually works.

Each month, The Conference Board surveys 5,000 US households with five questions constructed to assess opinions on current business and employment conditions, business and employment conditions in the next six months, and total family income for the next six months. Participants answer "positive," "negative" or "neutral" to each question posed

The survey reports its results in the form of three indexes: A Present Situation Index, an Expectations index and an overall composite, the Consumer Confidence Index.

A proportion known as the "relative value" is calculated for each question separately. Each question's positive responses are divided by the sum of its positive and negative responses. The relative value for each question is then compared against relative values from 1985 ("the baseline" values, each equal to 100%). This comparison to the relative values results in an "index value" for each question.

The index values for all five questions are then averaged together to form The Consumer Confidence index. The average of the index values for questions one and three form the Present Situation index, and the average of index values for questions two, four and five form the Expectations index. All very scientific and boringly statistical.

Really nothing to fear but fear itself. Oh, and some of these things.

What do the survey respondents see in their future that they don't see in the present? Are they afraid of specific things, or is it just the aggregate fear of souls who've been knocked about a little too much by a steady onslaught of unwelcome events these past few years?

In the 60s, Sylvia Fricker of Ian and Sylvia sang a song she wrote called "Maude's Blues" (1965) about losing being an acquired habit ("an Easy Game"). "Oh it's easy to fall and it's so hard to climb, pretty soon your fallin' all of the time." On the hopeful presumption that the popular mood is rooted in things more definitive than just chronic depression, here's a brief review of the status of quos most likely to be shading survey respondents' collective view of the future.

Number one suspect? Inflation. It's palpable, and almost everyone feels it. Over the last 10 years, inflation was averaging 1.88%, but in 2022 it jumped up to an annual rate of 8%. By May '23 it had dropped back to 4% — much better but still double the Federal Reserve Bank's annual target of 2%. Lots of things cause inflation, but the Federal Reserve has only one way to fight it: And it works, when it works,   v - e - r - r - y     s - l - o - o - w - l - y.   The Fed has raised rates 10 times since March 2022. pushing its benchmark Federal Funds Rate (the rate at which banks and credit unions borrow from and lend to each other) to between 5% and 5.25%, up from near zero in March 2022. And they promise more bumps to come.

The idea is to discourage consumer borrowing and spending, which then leads to lower prices. In addition to lowering inflation, higher interest rates reduce the public's purchasing power, freeze people out of the housing market and throw people out of work. You've got to be cruel to be kind, but this time the problem does finally seem to be attenuating. However, previous price jumps may stop rising but tend to get locked in. That's enough to cause people to regard the future with a jaundiced eye.

Supply chain backups, a tight job market, excessive government handouts, profit taking, pent up demand (like what might occur after people have been locked down in their houses because of a viral pandemic): all these things which were contributing problems over the last several years, should now be receding in the rear view mirror. And no, Joe Biden didn't cause inflation. (It's curious: people think Biden's too old and doddering and demented to be President yet still able to move mountains and lift impossibly heavy objects and weave extraordinarily complex conspiratorial strategems.)

Hunter Biden's laptop? Be serious.

The southern border: in truth a problem that's been around a long, long time. More than 86 million people have legally immigrated to the United States since 1783 (a figure last updated in 2019). Readers interested in really knowing what they're talking about with this at-once vexing and vital subject might find the Cato Institute's Brief History of U.S. Immigration Policy from the Colonial Period to the Present Day worth a quick skim. Or two.

It should be noted that immigrants are a vital component driving the U.S. economy, comprising 18% of the labor force. For instance, they account for 38% of home health aides, 29% of physicians and 23% of pharmacists and make up 22% of workers in the U.S. food supply chain. Immigrants start approximately 25% of the new firms in the United States.

About three-fourths of undocumented immigrants in the labor force are classified as "essential." Interestingly, the number of migrants illegally crossing the southwest U.S. border is at its lowest point since the start of the Biden administration, with just over 3,000 migrants stopped by the Border Patrol each day.

Side Note

For all the din, probably only a very small percentage of Americans worry themselves to sleep each night thinking about the border. Unless of course you're a politician.

A dyspeptic, insecure and thin-skinned maniac taking up residence in the White House again? That could be disruptive.

A dyspeptic, insecure and thin-skinned maniac not taking up residence in the White House again? Ditto. (Political polarity exacts its price.)

Economic fragility: probably the thing people should fear most about the future, even if they don't realize it. GDP growth has been steady, if not robust, this year. Jobs continue on their strong growth path, despite the predictions of professional doubters, and consumer energy remains, well um, energetic, both in the face of the Fed's best efforts. Yet professional prognosticators quietly continue to warn of a possible recession before the year is out. Given the economy's ignorant persistance, they have been reduced to calling for an historically "lighter" recession than most. According to a report from The St. Louis Federal Reserve, recessions tend to occur infrequently and usually arise from unexpected shocks. Their writer, with rare institutional candor, admits, "historically, forecasters have not been successful in predicting when real GDP growth will be negative."

If you're one of those people looking forward to that day when the worrisome future becomes the worrisome present, recession is probably your best bet. The economy has been surprisingly "steady as she goes" this year, but who knows what kind of unforseen shock its relatively fragile condition will prove, like Covid, unable to resist? There's still plenty of time for the goblins to turn out to be right after all and give the forecasters their day in the sun.

Anyway, here's hoping the cartoon cheered you up some.

With a nod to Paul Krugman, "Can Anything Be Done to Assuage Rural Rage?"
NYT, Jan. 26, 2023

What follows is a repost from something that originally appeared on this website back in 2018. Nothing seems to have changed much with respect to the subject, so why not?

The earlier piece was occasioned by an assertion made by then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that federal overspending was our collective penance for failure to address excessive entitlement benefits sooner.

Sound familiar? It should. House Republicans are currently demanding cuts in entitlements as their price for supporting a debt ceiling increase. They are specifically targeting Social Security and Medicare programs.

In essence, they threaten to make it impossible for the government to pay any of its bills unless they get their way. The ensuing default would have a deleterious effect on the country’s credit rating, to say the least, and thus create significant financial damage, which presumably they hope would fall principally around the White House's shoulders.

No need to pen something new about this gambit, as old as it is unseemly; this earlier piece still suffices nicely. It’s about all the same nonsense, and all the things that were wrong with his reasoning still pertain.

In 2018, Mitch McConnell was criticizing the same "out-of- control" spending problem that current House Republicans bemoan, although with the unusal tacit implication that his own party had some part in passing the laws that authorized the spending in the first place.

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear.

Men (and Woman) at Work

The difference between Mitch McConnell then and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, along with his present band of merry pranksters from the laughably termed “Freedom Caucus” is that they don’t even know what McConnell wasn’t talking about.

The most successful social support programs in our nation’s history, which they and their party have despised from their inception. Which their predecessors actually fought tooth and nail against creating.

It’s not deficit reduction they’re after at all. It’s something else entirely. Damn your eyes, FDR and LBJ!! They’ve never gotten over them. And they’re still losing elections to them.