Kevin Drum 🕸

Last month, GAO audited the auditors. That is, they took a look at IRS audits of rich people to see how much, on average, they collected from them. Here are the results: Oddly enough, the enormous jump in 2022 is because of a Republican initiative. By 2020 audit rates of rich people had gotten so ...continue reading "Auditing the rich really pays off"

I suppose this is well known among a select group of people, but not to me. So here is Albert Einstein after visiting the United States in 1921, just after his general theory of relativity had been confirmed via eclipse sightings. The quotes are from a story that ran on page 9 of the New ...continue reading "Einstein on America"

A few weeks ago NBC News reported on a suicide crisis among Hispanics. What's the cause? A variety of the usual suspects: The pandemic hit young Hispanics especially hard .... parents don’t speak English .... poorer households .... cultural barriers .... cultural and systemic obstacles .... minorities face added economic and societal obstacles .... may ...continue reading "Hispanic suicides aren’t really a crisis"

Everyone is familiar with the Amber Alert system. It's for abducted children, and it's named after Amber Hagerman, who was kidnapped and murdered in 1996. For some reason, though, its original backers thought it would be better to have a more official name for it, so by the time it was legislated nationwide in 2003 ...continue reading "Amber, Blue, Silver, Yellow, Feather, Ebony"

Spring training is upon us, but since no actual games have been played yet we need something else to be outraged about while we wait. Tyler Kepner of The Athletic reports that it's baseball's new uniforms: they're a "fashion flop" and an "assault on the eyes." But even by the end of a thousand word ...continue reading "Baseball’s new uniforms are literally violence against fans"

Joshua Keating asks today, "what does deterrence even mean, really?" It's a good question for at least two reasons: (a) deterrence against what? and (b) what's the evidence? The first question is critical. The most famous case of deterrence is the MAD doctrine during the Cold War. It worked! But in the modern world deterrence ...continue reading "Does deterrence work?"

Apparently the damages against Donald Trump in his business fraud case have been accumulating interest at a 9% annual rate for several years: On profits from the sale of the Old Post Office: interest is owed since May 2022. On profits from the sale of Ferry Point: interest is owed since June 2023. On everything ...continue reading "CORRECTION: Trump actually owes about half a billion dollars"

Alex Tabarrok links today to an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal which has some good news: the T-Mobile/Sprint merger in 2020 wasn't anti-competitive! But this paragraph piqued my curiosity: Average monthly mobile subscription fees dropped sharply. In the three years before the merger, according to government price data, mobile charges declined in real terms ...continue reading "Here’s what really happened after the T-Mobile/Sprint merger"

The judge in Donald Trump's fraud case has returned a damage assessment of $355 million. That's a lot! This will be appealed, of course, so Trump won't have to pay anything soon. Still.

I'm not sure there's anything really new here, but today the New York Times reports on Donald Trump's view of abortion: Former President Donald J. Trump has told advisers and allies that he likes the idea of a 16-week national abortion ban with three exceptions, in cases of rape or incest, or to save the ...continue reading "Trump triangulates on abortion"

Here is Hilbert puffing his face out and sniffing the atmosphere way up on the second story. Everything in the world needs to be sniffed, over and over and over.

I was amused by this editorial choice in the LA Times today: The point of the piece is that we shouldn't stereotype Gen Z. So what's the illustration? A bunch of teen girls stereotypically absorbed in social media. Don't the editors at the Times know that a picture is worth a thousand words? But set ...continue reading "Teens seem to be in pretty good shape these days"

Every five years the Department of Agriculture releases a Census of Agriculture. The latest edition came out on Tuesday, and for some reason I thought it would be interesting to document the decline of the small family farm. Here it is: There's no decline at all. I've been hearing for practically my entire adult life ...continue reading "Small farms are booming"

Good ol' Fox News: Sean Hannity's Fox News show ran with this informant's claims in at least 85 separate segments last year, including 28 monologues. He said they proved Joe Biden engaged in "public corruption on a scale this country has never seen before.” https://t.co/5ziUvNOwt4 https://t.co/tzBXuJd1p4 — Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) February 15, 2024 The informant ...continue reading "Yet another Biden crime story goes up in smoke"

This is a little boat landing on the outskirts of Giverny. The stream is the Epte River, which runs along the entire southern edge of town. It doesn't look like much, but it's 70 miles long and empties into the Seine a few miles from this spot.

Maybe you know this, maybe you don't. For most of the economic expansion following the Great Recession, wages grew about the same for everyone. In 2019 that changed. Over the past five years, incomes of the poor have increased 10% while incomes of the rich have stagnated: There's no need to feel sorry for the ...continue reading "Raw data: Wage growth at top and bottom"

Yesterday morning, a fellow named Justin McGowan asked his local country station to play a song from Beyoncé's new album. The New York Times tells us what happened next: The station manager, Roger Harris, emailed Mr. McGowan back with a concise rejection: “We do not play Beyoncé at KYKC as we are a country music ...continue reading "Not everything is racist"

A pair of dolphins swimming alongside our boat during my whale watching cruise last month.

Has anyone ever explained this? It just keeps going on and on. New business applications have been running more than 100,000 above trend ever since the start of the pandemic. By now it amounts to about 5 million excess applications. Why would the pandemic have this effect? And why would it still be going strong ...continue reading "Why is business formation so strong?"

Victory! U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has drafted plans to release thousands of immigrants and slash its capacity to hold detainees after the failure of a Senate border bill that would have erased a $700 million budget shortfall, according to four officials at ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. ....Some of the proposed cost ...continue reading "ICE considers mass release of illegal immigrants, just what Trump wants"