Kevin Drum 🕸

The Inflation Reduction Act was mostly a climate bill, but it also included a few other things. One of them was a provision that allows Medicare to start negotiating the price of prescription drugs instead of just paying whatever vendors feel like charging. Negotiations between buyer and seller are a standard part of market economies, ...continue reading "Medicare chooses $50 billion worth of prescription drugs to start negotiating over"

Multiple myeloma is in the news again: House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) announced Tuesday that he has a “very treatable” form of blood cancer and has begun treatment that will last the next several months. “After a few days of not feeling like myself this past week, I had some blood work done,” Scalise ...continue reading "Multiple myeloma growing in popularity"

July was not a good month for employment: Both job openings and hires dropped sharply yet again. Job openings were down 338,000 and hires were down 167,000: In percentage terms, job openings were down 22% from a year ago and hires were down 9%. Hires are now below their mid-2018 level. Quits were also down, ...continue reading "Job openings and hires were down yet again in July"

Earlier today, while I was browsing through the MINT8 retirement report, I noticed something I had missed on earlier reads: estimates of the number of workers with pensions. As we all know, the era of the traditional "defined benefit" pension is pretty much over except for government workers. These are pensions that had a defined ...continue reading "Raw data: Retirement pensions among the rich and poor"

A couple of days ago I was thinking, as one does, about the equivalence of gravitational mass and inertial mass. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, all mass has two properties: It is attracted to other mass (gravity). It resists having its motion changed (inertia). This is true even out ...continue reading "The mystery of gravity and inertia"

Donald Trump looks to be a busy man next year: Busy calendar (per @cnn): pic.twitter.com/sqhxijdP2S — Paul Farhi (@farhip) August 28, 2023 This is an impressive graphic, and I don't blame CNN for running it. At the same time, complex federal trials never begin on time—and they're really not going to begin on time in ...continue reading "When will Donald Trump go to trial?"

A lone rider makes her way up the escalator from the Madeleine metro station in Paris.

In the Wall Street Journal today, Andy Biggs takes issue with a recent GAO report that says retirement savings are in trouble, especially for low-income workers: Among all households of workers 51 to 64 earning more than $20,000 in 2019, 80% either have a retirement account or are entitled to traditional pension benefits. Even among ...continue reading "How are we doing on retirement these days?"

Why are there so many more earthquakes than there used to be? My friend the geophysicist answers: Before 1960 there was only a minimal global network of seismometers, and it was difficult to share data among researchers. After the 1963 Test-Ban Treaty in which the USA and the USSR agreed to cease detonating nuclear devices ...continue reading "Here’s why we have more earthquakes"

Since its peak in the mid-90s, violent crime is down 40%. Anti-Black hate crime is down 50%: Anti-Black hate crime has trended downward over the past 25 years but began to turn back upward after Ferguson. It spiked during the George Floyd protests before dropping the following year, and is currently up by a third ...continue reading "Raw data: Anti-Black hate crime"

I got pointed to a paper earlier today that summarized the trend in natural disasters in recent years. It wasn't super interesting, but it did have one thing that intrigued me: What's up with this? These are major earthquakes, so it's not likely to be a measurement issue. But for some reason the number of ...continue reading "Climate change is producing a more disastrous world"

Here is the minimum wage for California compared to the federal minimum wage: The federal minimum wage lost value in practically every year since 1980, while the California minimum generally continued to rise with inflation. In 2016, as the federal minimum fell further and further behind inflation, California went in the other direction, raising it ...continue reading "Raw data: The minimum wage in California and the nation"

In our Twitter spat a couple of days ago Chris Geidner mentioned a new law that prevented trans kids from getting gender affirming care up through age 18. I corrected that to 17, thinking of the Tennessee law that was recently upheld in federal court. But no. It turns out Alabama has a law that ...continue reading "Alabama bans gender-affirming care up to age 19"

My blog is now an adult: 21 years old and legally able to drink and enter into binding contracts. Still too young to run for president, though. So what should my blog do to celebrate?

We all know that NAEP test scores dropped substantially between 2019 and 2022, largely due to virtual teaching replacing in-person teaching. At least, that's what we think happened. I got curious about this the other day: Did states that kept schools open during the 2020-2021 school year do better than states that closed schools? First, ...continue reading "Raw data: Test scores were about the same in states that kept schools open and closed during COVID"

This is Hilbert, rolling around in the dirt in the front yard. You would hardly believe how filthy he gets when he does this. Luckily, if I pick him up and place him on the grass he's happy to roll around there too, and that cleans off all the dirt.

This is going to sound weird, but hear me out. There are upwards of 4,300 religions in the world, and even faithful churchgoers don't believe in 4,299 of them. My only difference with them is that I don't believe in 4,300. Is that really such a big deal?

Why are so many people writing that Donald Trump was the winner of Wednesday's debate? Are they just on autopilot? I've seen no evidence, either anecdotal or in poll numbers, that he benefited in any way from his absence. He might not have been harmed by his absence either, but that hardly means he "won."

Fed chair Jerome Powell is still hawkish on inflation: In a highly anticipated speech at the Fed’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Powell vowed that the central bank has not lost its resolve to cool inflation to 2 percent, even as annual measures of price increases have steadily dropped to roughly 3 percent. That progress ...continue reading "Note to Jerome Powell: Inflation has been dropping for 12 months"

Here is a Twitter conversation I had yesterday: Chris Geidner's tweet sort of proves my point. He makes a loathsome accusation that I must be anti-trans simply because I have some issues with the most extreme factions of trans activism. I feel like I should hardly need to say this, but I'm entirely pro-trans and ...continue reading "How far should activists go?"