Coyote Blog

When I saw the headline of this post by Kevin Drum -- Our Personal Data Is Worth a Lot. Facebook Should Pay For It -- I was just going to use it as the starting point for a quick post saying that if we should be paid by Facebook for our personal data, the government should pay my company for all the data (Census, DOL, etc) that we are asked to provide.

However, when I actually read the post, I was simply amazed at the way Leftists think about solutions to this.  To me, the least intrusive solution is say that Facebook needs to be transparent about the data it gathers so users can decide intelligently if they want to be on the platform.  Or, if we decide that Facebook is not a near-monopoly common carrier, the second least intrusive solution is to require Facebook to allow users to opt out of having their private data used for things beyond providing core services of the platform.  If Facebook can't make that business model work, they might charge users $10 a month but waive the charge if you opt in to their using the data for a defined set of other purposes.  Because we already are being paid for our data in the form of free usage of a (to some) valuable platform.  Its just a very non-transparent transaction where both the costs and benefits are hard to evaluate.  The best role for the government is to make it easier for us as individuals to better understand this cost-benefit tradeoff.

But here are the default solutions from two folks on the Left:

Shapiro thinks we all deserve a cut of that since this personal data is, after all, ours. He suggests a complicated mechanism where the government collects the money and then cuts everyone a check. But why not just levy a tax and be done with it? That would be simpler. Put all the money in a special fund designed to . . . I dunno, fight income inequality or buy everyone computers. I’ll bet Elizabeth Warren could come up with a plan for it.

Ugh, really?  If I did not read his blog all the time I would almost think Drum's personal solution is parody.   Does he really think giving my money to Elizabeth Warren to spend is a way for me to recover any value?

This same failure has happened over and over, at one time or another in Russia and Mexico and now in Venezuela.  Some tried to make it happen in the 1970's in the US, and Elizabeth Warren would still like to try, I bet.  Socialists take over the oil industry and revel in the first months about all they money they are able to divert to "social" expenditures.  Then, in a few year, it all comes crashing down.  This tweet from Michael Moore five years ago gives you a good idea of the thinking.

Socialists have always seen production and wealth creation as some sort of magic, a fountain in the desert where piggy rich people push to the front and take more than their fair share.  Oil looks to them as the ultimate example of this -- wealth just flows out of the ground and evil rich people at Exxon grab it all for themselves.

But in fact, oil is just the opposite of the magic fountain.  It takes a huge quantity of money and brains to get even one drop of it in usable form to your car.  Imagine trying to figure out where even to look for oil when it is hiding far under ground.  Or having to poke holes a mile into the ground from structures standing in 1000 foot deep water in the Gulf of Mexico.  And then transporting the oil hundreds or thousands of miles by pipeline and ship and train and truck.  And then carefully refining the oil almost molecule by molecule in multi-billion dollar facilities.  And then getting the usable parts to the right people, including distribution outlets for you and I on almost every corner of town.

Right now gasoline in Phoenix goes for about $2.85 a gallon, which is about $2.40 before taxes.  This is 60 cents a quart, which compares to the retail price of a bottle of water of about $2.00-$2.50 a quart.  It's a freaking miracle of modernity that you can fill your car this inexpensively.

Anyway, it turns out that oil is the ultimate "you have to spend money to make money" kind of business.  And once you spend all that money, you investment immediately starts dying.  Oil companies have to completely rebuild retail gas stations every 20-30 years.  Refineries have to be constantly updated with really expensive improvements to take advantage of new technologies, to adjust to changing markets and regulations, and to handle different types of crude oil.  And then there is oil production.  Drill a well today and the moment you open it up, the production starts to fall off.  The flow will drop, the percentage of water might increase-- a million things can happen and all of them bad.  To keep wells flowing companies constantly have to reinvest their profits in reworking the wells (fracking and such) and adding enhanced recovery systems.  As fields deplete, new wells have to be drilled in new locations or at new depths, or else whole new fields have to be developed to replace them.

The "greedy and short-term-focused" oil companies reinvest much of their earnings to make sure the supply of oil is sustained.  The "enlightened" socialists harvest all the cash they can and hand it to their cronies, allowing the production assets to fall apart and, eventually, their economy to collapse.

This is definitely from the schadenfreude files, via the WSJ:

After the Trump administration announced new tariffs on imported washing machines in January, Marc Bitzer, the chief executive of Whirlpool Corp., celebrated his win over South Korean competitors LG Electronics Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.

“This is, without any doubt, a positive catalyst for Whirlpool,” he said on an investor conference call.

Nearly six months later, the company’s share price is down 15%. One factor is a separate set of tariffs on steel and aluminum, imposed by the U.S. in March and later expanded, that helped drive up Whirlpool’s raw-materials costs. Net income, even with the added benefit of a lower tax bill, was down $64 million in the first quarter compared with a year earlier.

Sorry Trump supporters, your guys are not being "scrappy", they are being stupid.  In the same way that Harry Reid failed to understand that his party might some day be out of power and thus felt free to set precedents that are now helping the Republicans, Republicans will be out of power again some day and the precedents being set now will be used against them.  In fact, both parties are currently setting precedents we will have to live with the rest of our lives.

Two things in particular come to mind.  First is the bullying of judges.   This is just stupid.  Most senior judges are precisely the sort of folks who don't roll over to bullying, and in fact probably have a tendency to bare their teeth and fight back.  It is just simply insane for the Trump administration to make the statements they are making about pending cases and their judges.

Second, the censure last night of Elizabeth Warren was ridiculous.  I actually think the criticisms of racism of Sessions are dated and overblown, but so what?  They are perfectly reasonable criticisms to bring up in a confirmation hearing.  Just because Sessions is a Senator should not make him immune to criticism in confirmation hearings.  The Senate should recognize in their rules that criticizing a Senator in a confirmation debate is way different than criticizing a Senator in the normal course of Senate business. Of course, these Senate rules are exactly why Presidents love to nominate Senators for the Cabinet, because they tend to get a pass from their old colleagues.  Well, no more.

My small business has a Visa account with Bank of America so that our managers can have the ability to charge small expenses.  My personal corporate card is part of that account.  At least twice a year, I get the dreaded call from the bank telling me my card number was part of a data breach and I have to get a new card.  And then I have to spend hours and hours updating a zillion online accounts with new numbers, and I face weeks and months of past due notices from accounts I forgot to change.

I am willing to accept Bank of America's explanation that some merchant outside their system caused the breech.  So each time I ask the obvious question, "who was the merchant so I can stop doing business with them?"  And every single time Bank of America refuses to tell me.  For reasons beyond my reckoning, Bank of American and apparently the Visa system have a vow of Omerta in which they protect security-deficient retailers from scrutiny.  It is infuriating.  In a free society, we should not need the government to hold merchants accountable for data privacy, we should be able to do it ourselves as customers.  Apparently I am not the only one who is similarly frustrated by this.

Does anyone know of any Visa issuers that are more transparent about the sources of data breaches?  Is Amex better on this than the Visa/MC system?

Update:  From a Senior Fraud Analyst at Bank of America:

I am responding to an email you sent to us regarding the data compromise situation that keeps happening with your corporate card.

I do understand the frustration you experience.  We are not provided specific details about where the compromise occurred.  The compromise could have happened sometime in the past and it may not be limited to one specific merchant or processing center.  I do understand that  you not wanting to use the card at the site of the compromise, but keep in mind that when a merchant or processing center is compromised they likely took measures to improve their security, the continued compromises could be coming from different processing centers or merchants and not the same place each time.

My email back in response:

This is how banks invite regulation on themselves.  If Visa and the large credit card issuing banks were more transparent with customers about retailers that create data breaches, customers could take their own action to police irresponsible parties by taking their business elsewhere.  Ditto merchant processors -- we businesses could easily shift our merchant processing accounts.  But instead, by creating this sort of rule of Omerta where you protect the irresponsible party from public disclosure, people feel helpless.  It is in that environment that folks like Elizabeth Warren can create so much havoc with regulation.

By the way, please do not tell me to be comfortable that the offending merchants have already tightened up their security.  It has been nearly 18 months after the requirements that merchants accept chip cards to avoid extra liability and half the stores I visit still have the chip card slot on their credit card machines disabled.  No retailer is going to stop being irresponsible until you banks stop protecting the bad ones.  Look what happened at Target - they got a lot of bad publicity from their breach but you can be damn sure they were one of the first that were accepting chip cards.

NY state attorney general (and others) pursuing potential criminal and civil charges against ExxonMobil for its climate change advocacy

US Virgin Islands AG (really) going after non-profit CEI for its climate change advocacy

Elizabeth Warren wants the SEC to ban companies from "saying whatever they want about Washington policy debates," a demand inspired by her frustration that financial firms are publicly disagreeing with her on the impact of her desired regulations

California AG Kamala Harris demanding non-profit donor lists, presumably so she can harass and intimidate the ones she does not like

California AG Kamala Harris has raided the home and seized video footage of an independent advocated/journalist  who did secret sting videos of Planned Parenthood, the exact same sort of advocacy journalism pursued legally (without legal harassment) by any number of Leftish groups in California and elsewhere  (I doubt Ms Harris plans to raid the home of PETA activists who trespass on farms to secretly film chicken and pig breeding).

It turns out there are strong speech protections in this country, except when you are a professional, and then there are none.

And of course, I still am fighting against a libel lawsuit meant to force me to remove this product review.

Update, add this one:  Tenured Marquette professor faces termination based on blog post with which University disagrees

When the student replied that he has a right to argue his opinion, Ms. Abbate responded that “you can have whatever opinions you want but I can tell you right now, in this class homophobic comments, racist comments and sexist comments will not be tolerated. If you don’t like that you are more than free to drop this class.” The student reported the exchange to Marquette professor John McAdams, who teaches political science. Mr. McAdams also writes a blog called the Marquette Warrior, which often criticizes the Milwaukee school for failing to act in accordance with its Catholic mission.

Mr. McAdams wrote on his blog that Ms. Abbate was “using a tactic typical among liberals now. Opinions with which they disagree are not merely wrong, and are not to be argued against on their merits, but are deemed ‘offensive’ and need to be shut up.” His blog went viral, and Ms. Abbate received vicious emails. She has since left Marquette.

But now Marquette is going after Mr. McAdams. In December 2014, the school sent him a letter suspending his teaching duties and banning him from campus while it reviewed his “conduct” related to the blog post. “You are to remain off campus during this time, and should you need to come to campus, you are to contact me in writing beforehand to explain the purpose of your visit, to obtain my consent and to make appropriate arrangements for that visit,” Dean Richard Holz wrote.

Lol, the university is going to prove he was wrong to write that universities avoid dialog in favor of saying "shut up" by telling him to  ...  shut up or be fired.

By the way, since nowadays it seems that supporting someone's free speech rights is treated the same as agreeing with that person, I will remind folks that having led a pro gay marriage ballot initiative briefly in Arizona, I am unlikely to agree with someone who thinks it should be banned.  But so what?  I would have absolutely no problem arguing with such a person in a rational way, something that faculty member Ms. Abbate seemed incapable of doing.  While I might disagree with him on any number of issues, Professor McAdams was totally right to call her out.  Besides, is the Left's goal really to take all opinion with which they disagree and drive it underground?  Force folks underground and you never know what will emerge some day.  Things like.... Trump supporters.

It is amazing to me that universities have become the least viable place in the US to raise and discuss controversial issues in the light of day.

To me, the sub-prime auto loan market looks exactly like the home mortgage market in about 2006.

Back before 2009, Progressives were pushing like crazy to get banks to write mortgages to low-income borrowers with bad credit.  Banks that refused to do so would face the wrath of the banking regulators and lawsuits over redlining and ever other thing the Left could think of.   Seriously, if you had tried to stop sub-prime lending in 2006 the Progressives would have excoriated you as being racist, hating the poor, etc.  When the whole mess inevitably collapsed, the Progressives suddenly were there blaming this lending to low income people on the banks, accusing them of predatory lending practices.

OK, so now it is 2006 in the consumer credit market, and specifically in auto loans.  Banks are making crap loans to no-credit individuals on cars and getting them off the books by securitization.   So let's get Elizabeth Warren on the record right now.  Should banks stop lending to these no-credit low-income people?  My bet is that she would support this lending, doubly so because the Obama Administration feels on the hook still for their GM and Chrysler bailouts and would rather not see these companies tank (which they would if sub-prime credit suddenly dried up).  So, before she can piously accuse banks of predatory practices 3 years hence when it all collapses, I want to know what Elizabeth Warren thinks of all this right now.

Update:  Well, good news and bad news.  Good news is that Elizabeth Warren has criticized sub-prime auto.  Bad news is she appears to be totally on the wrong track with causes, talking not about the fact the loans should not be written at all but about the fact that she thinks dealers are reaping huge profits marking up the loans.  It would be interesting to see what the Obama Administration would think about a clamp-down on sub-prime auto.  Methinks they might freak out at that, knowing sub-prime loans are all that is keeping US automakers out of a new recession.

One of the critiques of any trade deal of late is that there should be penalties for countries guilty of "currency manipulation."  The concern is that countries will devalue their currency in an effort to make their own exports cheaper to other nations while making it harder for other countries to export back to them.  As an example, if the Chinese were to do something that cuts the value of the Yuan in half vs. the dollar, their products look very cheap to American consumers while American-produced goods suddenly look a lot more expensive to Chinese consumers.

I have two brief responses to this:

1. I find it hilarious that anyone in the United States government, which has a Federal Reserve that has added nearly $2 trillion to its balance sheet in the service of cramming down the value of the dollar, can with a straight face accuse other nations of currency manipulation.  In practice in today's QEconomy, currency manipulation means another country is doing exactly what we are doing, but just doing it faster.
2. As an American consumer, to such currency manipulation by other countries I say, Bring it On!  If China wants to hammer its own citizens with higher prices and lower purchasing power just to subsidize lower prices for me, I am happy to let them do it.  Yes, a few specific politically-connected export businesses lose revenues, but trying to prop them up is pure cronyism.  Which is one reason I think Elizabeth Warren is a total hypocrite.  The constituency of the poor and lower middle class she presumes to speak for are the exact folks who shop at Walmart and need very price break on everyday goods they can get.  Senator Warren's preferences for protectionist trade policies and a weak dollar will hurt these folks the most.

After 7+ years of responding to any criticism by labeling it as "racist", President Obama is now tasting his own medicine as Elizabeth Warren's camp accuses Obama as being "sexist" for criticizing her.

I must admit this gives me a healthy does of Schadenfreude, but really, where does this end?  What prominent person is finally going to stand up and say that playing the race, gender, class, sexual preference, or whatever else card does not constitute discourse?  This is not discourse, it is anti-discourse.  It is the negation and preemption of argument and discussion by attempting to avoid dealing head-on and substantively the the actual issues raised.

Sorry, I don't have a source for this.

Making common cause with people with whom one disagrees about many other issues is a natural state of affairs for most libertarians.  Since we are such a minority, we can only make progress seeking out allies on the Left and Right on particular issues.  It was so natural to me that I was caught short when I ran Equal Marriage Arizona to find that many other people have no desire to do this.  They will not make common cause with you on an issue with which they agree with you 100% if they disagree with you on an array of unrelated issues.  I have now come to the conclusion that the latter attitude is more common than the former.  The problem with politics is, IMO, not the lack of compromise, but this lack of ability to make common cause across political lines on narrow issues.  Thus, for example, Elizabeth Warren is unable to make common cause with Republicans on the Ex-Im Bank, despite the fact it hits on two of her hot buttons (corporate subsidies and crony insider benefits for Wall Street bankers).

One local columnist thinks Andrew Thomas can win the Republican nomination for governor.  God forbid.  I would vote for Elizabeth Warren for governor before I voted for Andrew Thomas (or see the Phoenix New Times coverage).  Forget for a moment about his awful policy prescriptions, he is corrupt, and a serial abuser of power.

Last year when we finally folded up shop on Equal Marriage Arizona, a big reason we did so was lack of support from large gay rights groups.  A few said they had trust issues with a center-Right coalition to legalize gay marriage.  Fine.  But several said they did not want the gay marriage issue solved from the center-Right, they wanted Democrat credit for it.  Further, they did not want it solved in 2014, because they wanted to run on it to shift Arizona blue in 2014 and 2016.

I was skeptical of the latter, but it may be possible if the Republicans run Andrew Thomas.

Via the WSJ, President Obama is proposing debt forgiveness for student borrowers

The White House proposes that the government forgive billions of dollars in student debt over the next decade, a plan that cheers student advocates, but critics say it would expand a program that already encourages students to borrow too much and stick taxpayers with the bill.

The proposal, included in President Barack Obama's budget for next year, would increase the number of borrowers eligible for a program known casually as income-based repayment, which aims to help low-income workers stay current on federal student debt.

Borrowers in the program make monthly payments equivalent to 10% of their income after taxes and basic living expenses, regardless of how much they owe. After 20 years of on-time payments—10 years for those who work in public or nonprofit jobs—the balance is forgiven.

Already, it's pretty clear that many students pay little attention to size of the debt they run up.  Easy loans for students have essentially made them less price sensitive, however irrational this may seem (did you make good short - long term trade-offs at the age of 18?)  As a result, tuition has soared, much like home prices did as a result of easy mortgage credit a decade ago.  The irony is that easier student debt is not increasing access to college for the average kid (since tuition is essentially staying abreast of increases in debt availability), but is shifting student's future dollars to university endowments and bloated administrations.  Take any industry that has in the past been accused of preying on the financially unsophisticated by driving them into debt for profit, and universities are fifty times worse.

So of course, the Progressives in the White House and Congress (unsurprisingly Elizabeth Warren has a debt subsidy plan as well) are set to further enable this predatory behavior by universities.  By effectively capping most students' future financial obligations from student debt, this plan would remove the last vestiges of price sensitivity from the college tuition market.  Colleges can now raise tuition to infinity, knowing that the bulk of it will get paid by the taxpayer some time in the future.  Just as the college price bubble looks ready to burst, this is the one thing that could re-inflate it.

Postscript:  By the way, let's look at the numbers.  Let's suppose Mary went to a top college and ran up $225,000 in debt.  She went to work for the government, averaging $50,000 a year (much of her compensation in government is in various benefits that don't count in this calculation).  She has to live in DC, so that's expensive, and pay taxes.  Let's say that she has numbers to prove she only has $20,000 left after essential living expenses.  10% of that for 10 years is $20,000 (or about $13,500 present value at 8%).  So Mary pays less than $20,000 for her education, and the taxpayer pays $205,000.  The university makes a handsome profit - in fact they might have given her financial aid or a lower tuition, but why bother?  Mary doesn't care what her tuition is any more, because she is capped at around $20,000.  The taxpayer is paying the rest and is not involved in the least in choosing the university or setting prices, so why not charge the taxpayer as much as they can?

Postscript #2:  It is hard to figure out exactly what Elizabeth Warren is proposing, as most of her proposal is worded so as to take a potshot at banks rather than actually lay out a student loan plan.  But it appears that she wants to reduce student loan interest rates for one year.  If so, how is this different from teaser rates on credit cards, where folks -- like Elizabeth Warren -- accuse credit card companies of tricking borrowers into debt with low initial, temporary rates.  I  find it  a simply astounding sign of the bizarre times we live in that a leading anti-bank progressive is working on legislative strategies to get 18-year-olds further into debt.

I have been reading of late some histories of Germany in the 1930's, with a particular emphasis on racial laws and policy.   Over time the expanding bans on Jewish participation in the economy and society as well as preferences given to non-Jews for government jobs led to some practical problems, including:

• What percentage of Jewish blood made one Jewish?  The Nazis messed around with this problem a long time, in part because of Hitler's absolute reluctance to get involved in such details.  Was it one grandparent?  Three grandparents?
• How does one test for such things?  In the thirties, there was an boom in geneology research in Germany, as everyone raced around trying to figure out what evidence was sufficient to establish someone's race

It would be nice to think we put this kind of thing to bed, but here we are in the 21st century running around trying to answer the exact same questions

• Does 1/32 Cherokee blood make Elizabeth Warren the member of a protected group?  Does 1/8 black blood mean George Zimmerman is not a racist?
• We are building infrastructures to make rulings on race.  I found this story amazing

This story reminded me of the 1980s case of the twin red-haired Boston firefighters who claimed to be black, based on a photo of a great-grandmother and alleged oral history. While I remembered that they had gotten fired for their alleged fraud, I didn’t remember this detail:

Under current rules, said [general counsel to the state personnel office] Ms. Dale, candidates who say they are members of minority groups are judged by appearance, documented personal history and identification with a minority community. Disputes over claims of minority status are resolved by the Department of Personnel Administration.

 And indeed, there eventually was a two-day administrative hearing, in which the hearing officer determined that the twins failed all three criteria, and thus were not black. A judge upheld the ruling, finding that the twins had claimed minority status in bad faith.I have to admit being under the impression until now that as a legal matter, minority status was an in issue of self-reporting. But at least in the Massachusetts Civil Service system, one can get fired for “racial fraud.”

• Every year, in the name of some sort of racial harmony, I have to sit down and report to the government on the race of each of my employees.  For 364 days a year I can ignore the race of my employees, but one day a year the government makes me wallow in it.  Here are part of the instructions:

Self-identification is the preferred method of identifying the race and ethnic information necessary for the EEO-1 report. Employers are required to attempt to allow employees to use self-identification to complete the EEO-1 report. If an employee declines to self-identify, employment records or observer identification may be used.

Where records are maintained, it is recommended that they be kept separately from the employees basic personnel file or other records available to those responsible for personnel decisions.

Race and ethnic designations as used by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission do not denote scientific definitions of anthropological origins.

I am told we are trying to create a society free of racism, but the results sure look a lot like racism to me.

The PPACA instituted a cap on health insurance spending such that at least 80% of health insurance premiums must be spent on care. Academics like Elizabeth Warren love this idea.  So here is my modest proposal -- let's require that public universities spend at least 80% of tuition on classroom instruction.  If they spend more than 20% on administration and overhead, it gets rebated back to students.  Having nearly universally supported such a provision in the PPACA, academics surely can't oppose this, can they?

From today's WSJ:

A House subcommittee will hold an "oversight" hearing today on the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the über-regulator that will soon have jurisdiction over most of the country's credit-making institutions. We put "oversight" in quotes because Congress has little say over either the new bureau or its unofficial czar, Elizabeth Warren.

This unprecedented lack of accountability is by Ms. Warren's design. The bureau was the Harvard professor's idea, and she lobbied the Obama Administration and Congress to make it part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform. That law calls it an "independent bureau," akin to an independent agency like the Securities and Exchange Commission. But that's deceptive. Unlike other agencies, it isn't subject to annual Congressional appropriations.

Incredibly, the law says the bureau's director gets to set her own annual budget by requesting a share of the "combined earnings of the Federal Reserve System." The total she can request is capped this year at 10% of the Fed's total operating expenses (which in 2009 were $5.4 billion). That cap rises to 11% next year and 12% in 2013, and the Fed Chairman has no authority to deny her request. The director can also request an additional $200 million more per year for the next five years from Congress.

This arrangement may be unconstitutional under the separation of powers, and we hope it is soon tested in court. It was a deliberate political gambit to make the bureau less accountable to either Congress or the rest of the executive branch. In July, when its powers fully vest, the bureau will have supervisory authority over banks with more than $10 billion of assets and independent rule-making authority.

Both are cause for worry, given that the bureau will not have to incorporate the views of other banking regulators into its rules when it comes, for instance, to issues of safety and soundness. While the IRS Commissioner and Comptroller of the Currency report to the Treasury Secretary, Ms. Warren and her successors can tell him to crush rocks.

The affront is compounded by President Obama's decision to evade the spirit of the law by letting Ms. Warren set up the bureau without Senate confirmation. Republicans objected to her potential appointment, and even Democrat Chris Dodd said she would be hard to confirm. So Mr. Obama created a special position for her at both the White House and Treasury, letting her essentially create the bureau and hire its staff without facing the Senate. She has proceeded to sign up a raft of liberal antibank populists, such as former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, former AFL-CIO deputy counsel David Silbermann and University of Connecticut law professor Patricia McCoy

Imposing accountability on public officials is hard enough without laws being structured to purposely evade it.

Todd Zywicki has a nice post on the The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke by Professor Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi. 

In his writings on the tactics for engineering the communist state, Karl Marx talked a lot about the need to "proletarianize the middle class."  This has been a very popular tactic among leftish writers and politicians today, attempting to convince the middle class that they never had it so bad.

I won't repeat Zywicki's whole post, but the books author's argument revolve around examples which purport to show that as families go from one to two earners, their costs (health care, child care, cars, mortgage, etc.) go up by more than the additional income, making them poorer on a discretionary spending basis.

Zywicki first points out the same thing I immediately thought of when I read a summary of the book:

It is not clear what to make of all of this, except that it is hard to
see how this confirms the central hypothesis of "The Two-Income Trap"
that "necessary" expenses such as mortgage, car payments, and health
insurance are the primary draing on the modern family's budget. And
again, this unrealistically assumes that all increased spending on
houses and cars is exogenously determined, ignoring the possibility
that an increase in income leads to an endogenous decision by some
households to increase their expenditures on items such as houses and
cars.

While the assumption seems crazy, it makes sense in the context of leftish ideology, which holds that the middle class have only limited free will and tend to have their decision making corrupted by advertising and other corporate pressures.

But Zywicki goes further, and actually digs into the author's numbers.  He finds that the authors are surprisingly coy about addressing changes in taxation in their numbers.   Zywicki then uses the authors' own numbers, this time with taxes factored in using the authors' own assumptions, and gets these two charts:

As Zywicki summarizes:

As can readily be seen, expenses for health insurance, mortgage, and automobile, have actually declined
as a percentage of the household budget. Child care is a new expense.
But even this new expenditure is about a quarter less than the increase
in taxes. Moreover, unlike new taxes and the child care expenses
incurred to pay them, increases in the cost of housing and automobiles
are offset by increases in the value of real and personal property as
household assets that are acquired in exchange.

Overall, the typical family in the 2000s pays substantially
more in taxes than in their mortgage, automobile expenses, and health
insurance costs combined. And the growth in the tax obligation
between the two periods is substantially greater the growth in
mortgage, automobile expenses, and health insurance costs combined. And
note, this is using the data taken directly from Warren and Tiyagi's
book.