An up-and-down jobs report shows where action is needed for our post-COVID economy

A lot of grumbling happened after yesterday's US jobs report, where a bounce-back from August's "meh" was expected....and didn't happen.

The U.S. economy created jobs at a much slower-than-expected pace in September, a pessimistic sign about the state of the economy though the total was held back substantially by a sharp drop in government employment.

Nonfarm payrolls rose by just 194,000 in the month, compared with the Dow Jones estimate of 500,000, the Labor Department reported Friday. The unemployment rate fell to 4.8%, better than the expectation for 5.1% and the lowest since February 2020.

The headline number was hurt by a 123,000 decline in government payrolls, while private payrolls increased by 317,000....

“This is quite a deflating report,” said Nick Bunker, economic research director at job placement site Indeed. “This year has been one of false dawns for the labor market. Demand for workers is strong and millions of people want to return to work, but employment growth has yet to find its footing.”

The last two months have definitely seen flattening out after 4.5 million jobs were added in the first 7 months of 2021, and we still are well below the peak level of jobs that we had in February 2020.

But what jumps out at me isn't the lower-than-expected payrolls figure, it's the wide disparity among sectors in the US economy for September. Particularly the surprising number of areas that lost jobs in a month when the country was gaining nearly 200,000.

Let's start with the stat that should jump out at people, with schools in session by mid-September.

Local government education - 144,200

That number actually reflects lower-than-normal hiring for the school year, but it matches up with a lot of stories we saw in recent weeks about shortages of bus drivers and other school staff. It also indicates that a lot of people likely left teaching after 2020 or 2021, like my friend in Mauston who retired after 30+ years of teaching because she is immunocompromised and it just became too much.

In the private sector, the sectors that lost in September seems to be more adjustments to the 2021 version of COVID World.

Biggest private sector job losses, Sept 2021
Nursing and Residential Care Facilities -37,600
Food/Beverage Store -12,300
Auto Manufacturing -6,100

No surprise that people don't want seniors and others with high needs to be in nursing homes, and others don't want to work in such confined places. Seems like an alternative way to help these people would be a good idea.

Fortunately, the "big infrastructure" bill in Congress would do just that.

Translation for health care:

Reducing drug prices.
Extending extra ACA premium help.
Adding benefits to Medicare.
Filling the Medicaid coverage gap.
$ for home and community-based services, including wage hikes for caregivers. https://t.co/Mh7ssc9l0S

— Larry Levitt (@larry_levitt) October 4, 2021

And while anti-mask wackos get all the media, this was happening on Capitol Hill this week.

Thanks @SenBobCasey and @RepJayapal for visiting our 24hour vigil for home and community based services and understanding #CareCantWait pic.twitter.com/vy397jtsFl

— Colleen Flanagan (@ColleenFlangan) October 7, 2021

As for food/beverage stores, it appears that the growth that this sector had when COVID first broke out has now been unwound, as people move on to new jobs and more people are comfortable with eating/drinking. Interestingly, Big Box stores have not had a similar unwinding, which indicates that perhaps people are consolidating their trips into one place to buy these products.

And auto manufacturing is having an understandable cutback in a time when consumer spending has plummeted on autos, due tio higher prices, supply shortages, and a cutback after a buying binge in late 2020 and early 2021.

Interestingly, the rest of the manufacturing sector had strong gains in September, with 32,000 jobs added outside of the auto sector, and over 180,000 new jobs since April. Construction also had a nice (seasonally-adjusted) bounce-back after a weak Summer.

Think those sectors could gain even more if we put in programs for more roads and bridges? Yeah, me too.

We also saw some adjustments to COVID's resurgence in September. Bars and restaurants have only 4,300 more jobs than they had in July, and hotels and other accomodation services only added 2,100 in September. But delivery and warehouse jobs have started hiring again over the last 3 months.

So what the jobs report tells me is that our economy is still disrupted and likely permanently changed in some ways due to COVID-19, and we need to adjust our policies, resources and expectations accordingly. Doing nothing and letting these changes play out will leave an unacceptable number of people behind, and while GOPs may be fine with that (because it will help them in the 2022 elections), it would be awful for a country that has already taken far too many hits in the 2020s.

Same old story on COVID in Wis. Cases still high, and rurals getting it worse

Not much changed in the weekly update of county-by-county COVID stats from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. The amount of new cases is around the same, at a 7-day average of 2,500-2,700 new cases a day. And even the places that have "critically high" rates of cases are mostly the same, although the number of counties at that level dropped from 21 to 17.

And for the second straight month, all 17 of the counties at the "critically high" category voted for Donald Trump, and the largest cities out of that group of counties are Chippewa Falls and Marinette.

Deaths also continue to stay high in Wisconsin, with cases averaging between 10 and 12 a day for the last month.

For both deaths and cases, rural Wisconsin has been damaged by COVID at a consistently higher rate than the metro areas. Especially up North.

Highest death rate from COVID, Wisconsin (statewide 139.0 per 100,000)
Iron 369.3
Florence 302.7
Forest 299.9
Lincoln 275.4
Waupaca 264.8
Menominee 241.4
Oneida 221.9
Dodge 219.7
Rusk 218.6
Vilas 211.8

Some of this may be skewed due to the small populations of these counties, but it is reflective of a larger trend in the country, where COVID has become a predominantly rural-based affliction, a complete turnaround from who was getting hit by the virus when it first broke out in 2020.

Rural Americans are dying of COVID at more than twice the rate of their urban counterparts — a divide that health experts say is likely to widen as access to medical care shrinks for a population that tends to be older, sicker, heavier, poorer and less vaccinated.

While the initial surge of COVID-19 deaths skipped over much of rural America, where roughly 15% of Americans live, nonmetropolitan mortality rates quickly started to outpace those of metropolitan areas as the virus spread nationwide before vaccinations became available, according to data from the Rural Policy Research Institute.

Since the pandemic began, about 1 in 434 rural Americans have died of COVID, compared with roughly 1 in 513 urban Americans, the institute’s data shows. And though vaccines have reduced overall COVID death rates since the winter peak, rural mortality rates are now more than double urban rates — and accelerating quickly.

And yet it's largely rural people that continue to refuse to get vaccinated, and it's rural GOP legislators that rail against any kind of mitigation measures. You'd think that would outrage a lot of people in the places that are getting hit hardest by COVID in Wisconsin.

But not yet, and so we all continue to get fight against the headwinds caused by these COVID-IOTS.

Yet another pointless, regressive WisGOP "reform" of unemployment

It appears like the Republicans in Wisconsin are coming up with a new list of “reforms” to the state's unemployment benefits and programming. Let's take a look, shall we?

The GOP ideas include drug testing those claiming unemployment benefits, providing cash payments to businesses that hire the long-term unemployed — meaning those who have collected benefits for more than 27 weeks — and directing job seekers to apply for specific job positions.

However, some measures in the proposal — including one that would force Gov. Tony Evers to direct federal COVID-19 stimulus dollars to businesses that hire the long-term unemployed — may set the bill up for a veto as the Democratic governor has rejected similar GOP measures related to the use of federal funds in the past.

Or maybe Evers will veto the bill BECAUSE THIS DOESN’T DO JACK TO DEAL WITH OUR WORKER SHORTAGE. And any data that you can look at on Wisconsin’s job market would tell you that.

We’ve had several months where oligarchs at WMC and other “business groups” have insisted that there was some hidden group of workers on the sidelines that just needed to have their CARES-era benefits cut off. But we know that’s not true, first because ALEC/GOP states that cut workers off of those expanded benefits hurt their own state’s economy, with little boost for their job market.

This is from a report by the Economic Policy Institute from 3 weeks ago, after the last monthly jobs reports from every state came out.

Claims that the pandemic unemployment benefits have slowed economy-wide job growth—which fueled the state-level terminations—are false. Instead, any potential gain to job growth driven by lower benefits chasing people into the labor market seems to have been offset by two counterweights: first, a consumer demand effect, in which there is a drag on growth stemming from reduced household spending when UI benefits are lost; and second, a “congestion” effect, in which job gains among former UI recipients crowd out other job seekers.

In fact, new research from a team of economists shows that the early, state-level UI terminations significantly reduced total incomes and consumer spending. The study found the benefit losses following these early terminations led to only the smallest boost in job-finding: Earnings from work rose by only $14 per UI recipient per week in states that cut off benefits, but weekly UI income fell by $278, for an average weekly net income loss of $264 per recipient. Because of lower total incomes, UI recipients spent $145 less weekly. On an annualized basis, the average person losing UI saw their annual income drop by $13,728, leading to an annual spending reduction of $7,450.

So making it harder to get benefits and cutting people off of unemployment (which the GOP bill tries to do) only succeeds in forcing people to settle for crappier jobs, and they spend less in the overall economy.

The only people that might have gained from these cutoffs are employers who got a needier group of workers to deal with (in normal times, anyway). Remarkably, the WisGOPs want to give those business owners another break by giving them the bonus for hiring workers that have been out of work for more than 26 weeks.

And take a guess where the funding for these payments to employers goes to? Yep, the stimulus funds that were sent to Wisconsin earlier this year, in a transparent attempt to keep Governor Evers from using those funds in a different (and more productive) way.

The legislation also would require the governor to provide employers with up to two $1,000 payments for hiring a person who has been unemployed for more than 27 weeks. The payments would be to help cover costs including wages, training and benefits. The bill dictates that those funds would need to come from the federal American Rescue Plan Act.

The bill has yet to be introduced, and I want to see if there are any requirements included on how much those workers get paid, or for long they have to be kept on (I’m betting there won’t be much….if any).

Stupid enough, but we also know that there isn’t some huge mass of Wisconsin workers that have been sitting back collecting unemployment instead of getting a job. In each of the last 6 months measured, the number of Wisconsinites in the labor force and working has risen, even with the $300/week add-on to unemployment benefits.

At the same time, the number of Wisconsinites on unemployment generally declined throughout the summer, even before they were cut off of PUA and the extended-claims PEUC program.

Wisconsin DWD officials note that this bill duplicates things that they do already, except that WisGOPs want to add on paperwork and unfunded mandates to those duties.

Jennifer Sereno, spokesperson for the state Department of Workforce Development, said the department has “significant concerns” about the GOP proposal due to the anticipated reporting burden for employers, potential costs associated with the bill and a lack of a sustainable funding source. Sereno also said the department is already carrying out several provisions detailed in the proposal, including providing reemployment services and work-search requirements.

The real problem is that WisGOPs are looking in the wrong direction when it comes to dealing with the workforce shortages and mismatches. The Journal-Sentinel had an article on the state's workforce issues today, and it is clear that the biggest workforce problem this state has is a demographic one.

Businesses are still struggling to find employees as older workers age out of the workforce. It’s a problem that has staying power, said Dennis Winters, chief economist for the DWD...

“We’ve known based on the age demographics of the population and the workforce, the older workers are aging out of the workforce, the Baby Boomers, and there weren’t enough folks coming in behind them to replace them.”

In an attempt to attract employees, businesses have increased their wages, offered signing bonuses and other benefits.

“Those are solutions to a micro-business problem,” Winters said. “Unfortunately, the underlying problem that we have with the workforce is a macro-problem, which is just not enough bodies to go around.”

And the only way you solve that is to find a way to make Wisconsin more attractive for workers to want to come here and raise their families here. But that involves the potential of taking away market share from established businesses, and not passing socially regressive BS that stirs up fundies and other rubes. And since that lessens the chances of Republicans getting votes and donations, that isn't going to happen as long as they're allowed to run any part of this state's government.

See Republicans really don’t care about making things better for Wisconsinites that have fallen out of work. They work for business owners, and want to make it as easy for those mediocrities as much as possible. No matter how much it slants the field against everyone else, harming the mass majority of the rest of us and holds our economy back.

What should judges know about election law, anyway?

In today's edition of "not the Onion..."

Former Supreme Court Justice Gableman, head of Wisconsin's partisan election review, says he does not understand how elections work -- via @natalie_eilbert and mehttps://t.co/8OgBCYx3eY

— Patrick Marley (@patrickdmarley) October 6, 2021

Let me repeat those first words. "Former Supreme Court Justice" Gableman. This guy's job for 10 years was interpreting election laws along with all other laws in Wisconsin!

And this dope wants to have the hearings behind closed doors? Next to a nail salon in a strip mall in Brookfield? Yeah, I don't think he can do that.

The "Special Counsel" is directing an investigation to assist the Committee; it is NOT the Committee. The WI Legislative Council's memo is very clear that subpoenaed witnesses must appear before the Committee in public—not before investigators or the "Special Counsel" in secret. pic.twitter.com/ON4Nn1eFkL

— Jules (@synathroesmus) October 3, 2021

And where can Gableman offer "immunity" in the first place? He's not a prosecutor or a judge. He's just some schmoe hired at taxpayer expense by Robbin' Vos. Anyone who says anything to this soulless lowlife in public without cameras rolling is being a SUCKER. Granted, this clown only won his seat due to blatant lies and hours of free advertising from AM Radio (thanks once again, Charlie Sykes), and he didn't run for another term in 2018 because he was going to be blown out of office.

But there's always a line of Koched-up wingnut welfare for these guys, who will say and do anything to keep the Big lie going and keep the rubes stirred up by claiming "there are questions to be answered." And if you didn't have enough proof that this was a GOP hack job, check out this passage from last week.

The "Dan O'Donnell Show," a conservative talk radio program in Milwaukee, initially reported the subpoenas, including one directed to the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

As of late in the morning of Oct. 1, the state commission's administrator Meagan Wolfe said her office had not received a subpoena, and Madison's chief elections official, city clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl, said she had also not yet received a subpoena.

But hey, it gives Dumb-O a lot of air time to make things up, right? Which is the only reason this absurdity is happening.

Here's something that doesn't seem to be in question - RW hacks from the Federalist Society just make it up as they go, and operate within a Bubble of their own BS. They must be cast out from all corners of our judicial system wherever possible.

I've had enough. This guy and his related clown show should be ignored. And disbarred.

Maps and more maps - WisGOP advantages in most, even if fairly drawn. So why gerrymander?

The People’s Maps Commission have finally released their initial work products in an attempt to create “fair maps” in Wisconsin ahead of redistricting for the 2022 elections.

After taking a gander at the draft possibilities, here at the 3 I like the best (1 from each level of map-making).

Congress

State Senate

State Assembly

I will include the Assembly map below, close in on the Madison and Milwaukee metro areas, then discuss it some more.

There are certainly improvements to be made, given that some regions and cities are split up in these maps (why are there 3 Assembly districts in the city of Waupun? And I’m not keen on having Appleton split across two Congressional districts). But those are relatively simple refinements.

It's worth noting that just because it’s a fair map, it doesn’t mean that Republicans wouldn't be likely to keep control of the State Legislature. For example, in the close 2018 Governor’s Election which Dem Tony Evers won by 1%, 58 Assembly districts voted for the GOP’s Scott Walker in the map I like, and 41 voted for Evers. This is a product of natural sorting, where Dems get 80-90% of the vote in many parts of Dane County and the City of Milwaukee, with few equivalent levels of dominance for Republicans in other parts of the state.

But what does change is the competitiveness of many districts, where they can flip to Dem in a year where Dems win statewide 53-46 instead of 50-49. That doesn’t exist nearly as much today. I'll use the Evers-Walker 2018 race as an example.

People's Maps
GOP 58, win 5 by 0-5%, 8 by 5-10%
Dem 41, win 4 by 0-5%, 2 by 5-10%

Current Maps
GOP 63, win 5 by 0-5%, 13 by 5-10%
Dem 36, win 1 by 0-5%, 2 by 5-10%

You can see where those 5 close GOP wins flip over in a fair map, and 5 more GOP districts become quite close. That’s the biggest benefit to a fair map, as GOPs might be forced to listen to all of their constituents instead of a fringe few that might make the difference in primaries, because ignoring the wider masses could get you beat in November.

Even GOPs seem to be admitting that putting out a rigged map isn’t in their best interest. Robbin’ Vos and the Assembly GOPs have their own website where they are allowing Wisconsinites to submit maps through October 15, and former Vos staffer Joe Handrick (who was a key drawer of the current GOP gerrymander) came up with his own wingnut welfare org’s version of a fair map one day before the People’s Maps Commission did.

Common Sense Wisconsin notes that the 2002 map was entirely drawn and enacted into law by a non-partisan panel of federal judges. In that trial, the federal court chose to adapt neither the Republican or Democratic map. Furthermore, the court in 2002 spent a great deal of time and focus on properly drawing Milwaukee districts subject to the Voting Rights Act of the United States and then revisited and redrew those districts again in 2012.

Common Sense Wisconsin has taken this 2002 map and leveled out the population due to the changes reported in the US Census.

The result is a plan that is stunningly similar to the non-partisan plan put into place by the court in 2002 and a plan that scores exceptionally high on the objective, non-partisan criteria laid out by the Peoples Commission.

The Common Sense plan dramatically reduces the number of split municipalities and counties, improves compactness, reduces the splintering of Milwaukee County, promotes communities of interest, and adheres to the Voting Rights Act. Remarkably, it does all this while also achieving low population deviation.

Remember that the 2010 GOP gerrymander tried to dilute Milwaukee County’s influence by stretching a number of districts to the west, and taking them into pro-GOP Waukesha County.

Handrick’s group says their maps would result in a GOP advantage of around 56-43 or 57-42. Granted, those maps don’t have a list of district-by-district statistics, so we can’t see how close the races are or are not (in other words – not all 56-43 advantages are the same), but it doesn’t look weird and seems to be in line what a straightforward map would be, and their 2020s map keeps more Milwaukee-area districts on their own sides of the county line.

After the People's Maps Commission released their maps, Handrick responded by saying his group's maps actually was better in representing racial minorities than the People's Maps did.

The federal courts in 2012 approved and/or drew 6 African American assembly district and 1 Latino district (a second district became majority voting-age Latino over the course of the decade). They also maintained 2 African American senate districts that had been created by the courts in 1992 and preserved the courts in 2002...

2 of the plans eliminate one of the Latino districts, reduces the African American districts from 6 to 4, and eliminates one of the two African American senate districts. The third plan actually eliminates both African American districts.

Granted, two of those Assembly districts that Handrick says was "eliminated" still have a majority of People of Color, and it looks like both of the currently Majority Black districts still are more than 50% non-white. And Handrick is clearly floating this out there as a way to try to give cover to WisGOPs to ignore what has been drawn up by the People's Commission.

But there is a legitimate underlying point. The 2020 Census shows that Milwaukee lost quite a bit of population, which means that the City will have fewer districts in this next round of redistricting, and the Black population declined by more than 8,000 in the 2010s, so there will likely be fewer seats with a Black majority in the next maps.

When I drew up my Assembly maps (see this post for how that ended up), racial makeup was one of the few factors I kept in mind, and I ended up with 5 districts with Black majorities, 2 with Latino/Hispanic majorities, and 1 other Assembly district that was more than 50% non-white (in Racine). In the Senate, I couldn't get 2 majority-Black districts, but got 3 that were majority non-white (one was 44% Black, one was 42% Hispanic/Latino).

With that in mind, I think a small tweak to the People's Maps to find another couple of Assembly districts that are majority-minority would be fine, and the larger point is that even Handrick's GOP group sees that a 62-seat Republican gerrymander is something that would face voter blowback. If the GOPs weren't drunk on power, they'd offer up something like the Handrick maps, and still be an overwhleming favorite to stay in power.

What’s also especially useful with all of these maps that have come out is that if/when Robbin’ Vos and Devin Lemaheiu come back with some kind of 2010s-style monstrosity in the coming months, they can’t fake innocence and can be accurately called out for the manipulations they try to put in. And we know just how to blow holes in whatever absurdity they try to come up with.

Despite COVID headwinds, US spending and incomes slogged ahead in August

With COVID's resurgence in August, I've been looking to see if that is causing other problems in the overall economy. Based on Friday's income and spending report, it looks like the answer is "not much yet," although July's numbers weren't as great as first advertised.

Consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, rebounded 0.8% in August. Data for July was revised down to show spending dipping 0.1% instead of gaining 0.3% as previously reported.

Consumption was boosted by a 1.2% rise in purchases of goods, reflecting increases in spending on food and household supplies as well as recreational items, which offset a drop in motor vehicle outlays. A global shortage of semiconductors is undercutting the production of automobiles....

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast consumer spending increasing 0.6% in August.

Most categories of spending were strong in August, even accounting for the 0.4% increase in inflation for the month. But as mentioned in the article, one clear exception has been spending on autos and auto parts, which now has plummeted after a Springtime surge.

Services spending was severely hurt when COVID first broke out in early 2020, and declined during the pandemic's worst days last Winter. But that hasn't happened yet with the Summer spike of 2021, although there was a bit of leveling off compared to the growth we saw earlier in the year.

On the income side, the overall number was relatively tepid, but that's more of a reflection of a fade-out of Biden Administration stimulus measures than any kind of economic slowdown, as wages and salaries continue to grow.

Though personal income gained only 0.2% in August after rising 1.1% in July as an increase in Child Tax Credit payments from the government was offset by decreases in unemployment insurance checks related to the pandemic, wages are rising as companies compete for scarce workers. Wages rose 0.5% in August, which should help to keep spending supported.

With inflation high, real disposable income dropped 0.3% after increasing 0.7% in July. The saving rate fell to a still-high 9.4% from 10.1% in July.

Wage and salary growth passed unemployment benefits for COVID-era income growth in June, and that gap continued to grow throughout the Summer.

Another item keeping a lid on income growth in August was the fact that businesses were seeing their loans run out under PPP 2.0. But underlying income growth for businesses kept going in the right direction.

So August was kind of a status quo with small but continued growth in base incomes and spending, but September had other concerns for ecomnomic activity. Another sizable source of national income get pulled away, as millions of Americans lost $300/week unemployment add-ons, along with the end of long-term benefits and the PUA program. COVID also remained a scourge for much of the country in September, and new unemployment filings are a bit higher over the last few weeks.

Even though the underlying fundamentals of the economy does seem to be better than 6 months ago, it also is clear that things are not back to pre-COVID normal. That means there is certainly a need in continuing demand through investments in infrastructure and added supports for the many Americans that are facing economic stress from the pandemic and/or the long-term changes in spending habits that have resulted.

With this reality in mind, failing to pass the two infrastructure bills in Congress would put the good economic growth of the last 6 months at serious risk of ending. That might be what Republicans want to see ahead of the 2022 midterms so they can return to power, but it's not something that would be good for most of Real America.

COVID got worse in September in Wisconsin. Especially in Trumpy, unvaxxed places

With September's end, it seems to be a good benchmark in assessing Wisconsin's COVID situation, particularly given that we reached multi-month highs in cases.

September also ended with a notorious milestone, as 8,000 Wisconsinites have now died of COVID, and the last 500 deaths have happened in a much quicker time frame than the previous 500.

Deaths from COVID, Wisconsin
7,000 deaths - 7,500 deaths 154 days
7,500 deaths - 8,000 deaths 53 days

Along the same lines, it is startling to realize that the number of new COVID cases in Wisconsin over the last 2 months is starting to approach the total number of cases that we had over the first 7 months of 2021.

New COVID cases 2021, Wisconsin
Jan 1 - July 31 141,999
Aug 1 – Sept 30 108,320

At 2,500 cases a day (our current average), that means those numbers should equalize in the next 2 weeks. Not a good thing at all.

It does look like new cases were declining over the last part of September, until over 3,300 new cases were reported on the 30th. Hopefully that’s just a one-day blip that might reflect the clean up of data at the end of a month, but it still tells us we need to be on guard.

And that’s especially true in areas where vaccinations aren’t happening. The evidence continues to get stronger that both types of unvaccinated Wisconsinites are behind the recent spike. Not only does the biggest increase in cases come overwhelmingly from kids under 18 (shown in blue in the first picture), but for the first time in this pandemic, children between ages 9 and 13 are getting more COVID cases that the (vaccine-eligible) group of older children.

There also seems to be an echo of the kids getting COVID that’s reflected with new cases among people aged 35-44 (in light green in the first picture) being higher than those 25-34 (in red), which also hasn’t happened in the previous 18 months.

Break the case trends down to the county level, and there’s a pretty clear regional divide. All counties have high levels of cases, but the ones in red have had 1% of their population come down with COVID in the last 2 weeks.

See all 21 of those counties in the red with “critically high” cases? All 21 voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, in a state that went for Joe Biden.

In addition, only 2 of those counties are above the statewide rate of 53.8% completion of the COVID vaccination cycle, with 15 falling below 50% vaxxed.

Seems pretty simple – if you’re vaccinated and not putting yourself in places of large-scale exposure, you’re a lot less likely to get COVID, and a lot less likely to have bad health outcomes if you happen to get COVID.

If you’re not doing these things, well, bad things are much more likely to follow. Choose wisely.