Kevin Drum 🕸

The top photo shows the sun setting over a Marine Corps construction project on the beach at Camp Pendleton. The project is a bunch of concrete boxes, and I don't know what they're for. Urban warfare exercises? The bottom photo is the same scene but from a different angle. The big cloud on the left ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

In the New York Times today, Laura Beamer and Marshall Steinbaum write about the catastrophe of America's student loan epidemic: America’s Student Loans Were Never Going to Be Repaid In recent years, many Americans with student loans weren’t making enough money to pay even the accumulating interest on their debt, let alone make progress on ...continue reading "The truth about student loans"

It's been a long time coming, but the FDA has finally approved an oral contraceptive you can get without a prescription. The US is now one of the dozens of countries that either formally or informally allow women to buy contraceptives over the counter: The reason for approving OTC contraceptives is simple. First, they're safe. ...continue reading "OTC contraceptives are finally here"

I'll confess that even I have a bit of inflation fatigue. But how about one more round? Today the BLS presents us with the latest figures for the Producer Price Index, which is basically wholesale prices. Here it is through June: Although the overall PPI jumped a bit in June, it has been absolutely flat ...continue reading "Wholesale prices in June show almost no inflation"

Here is the full text of the ill-fated Equal Rights Amendment: Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to ...continue reading "Is the ERA already the law of the land?"

Inflation is down. But there are doubters about the cause: All it took for inflation to be transitory was 500bps of rate hikes and 7% mortgage rates. — Conor Sen (@conorsen) July 12, 2023 Oh come on. This really doesn't bear much scrutiny. Here's inflation: Even if you don't believe me when I say that ...continue reading "Why is inflation down?"

According to Rolling Stone, Rupert Murdoch is wavering in his support for Ron DeSantis: In recent weeks, the Murdochs have grown increasingly displeased with the DeSantis campaign’s perceived stumbles, lackluster polling, and inability to swiftly dethrone Trump....According to two of the sources, Murdoch has privately winced at DeSantis’ nonstop cultural-grievance strategy, arguing that it is ...continue reading "Rupert Murdoch hates incompetent bigotry"

I don't know for sure how accurate this is, but it's certainly intriguing: This comes from David Rozado, who says he used ChatGPT to "automatically label a longitudinal sample of 1.7 million headlines from 12 popular U.S. news media outlets." If he's right, there was a big surge in pessimistic headlines in the late '60s ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Headlines are getting more pessimistic"

I've never liked having things in my ears, so on a whim I took advantage of Prime Days to buy a wireless "headphone" that fits around the back of your neck, curls over your ears, and produces sound via bone conduction. They're great! The sound is good,¹ the stereo separation is excellent, and they fit ...continue reading "News you can use, earbud edition"

Here are two views of the Palace of Versailles. They show pretty vividly why I've never much liked it: it's one of the most boring piles of stone in Europe. What's more, I've never been a fan of formal French gardens, so I don't even like the gardens of Versailles that much. And I've never ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Apparently everyone loves Monica Bertagnolli, Joe Biden's pick to run the NIH. Even Bernie Sanders likes her. But Bernie is miffed at Biden over some trivial issues related to drug pricing, so he's blocking her appointment. The impasse is just one of several Biden has encountered with respect to his nominees....Biden’s pick to run the ...continue reading "Unanimous consent is a cancer in the Senate"

Here is a mystery. Ever since the pandemic, Black men have been increasing their participation in the labor force. By March of this year they had increased their participation rate to match white men for the first time in history. Then, in a single month, participation for Black men suddenly tumbled by 2.7 percentage points ...continue reading "Why did Black men suddenly abandon the labor force in April?"

More Clarence Thomas weirdness today. His top aide, Rajan Vasisht, was responsible for collecting payments from guests to Thomas's annual Christmas party: Vasisht’s Venmo account — which was public prior to requesting comment for this article and is no longer — show that he received seven payments in November and December 2019 from lawyers who ...continue reading "Clarence Thomas: It’s Christmas, so pay up"

As usual, if it's CPI day it's also earnings day. Both weekly and hourly earnings for blue-collar workers were up at an annual rate of 4.7% from June to May. With headline inflation running at 2.2%, this means that worker pay went up about 2.5% in real terms. Not too bad. Hourly wages for all ...continue reading "Worker earnings were up modestly in June"

The CPI report for June was released this morning and it's nothing but good news. Headline inflation is at 2.2% and dropping, while core inflation finally cracked and is now down to 1.9%. Inflation is literally running at the rate the Fed wants it to. If you insist on wanting to know the conventional year-over-year ...continue reading "Inflation plummets near zero in June"

Over at the Wall Street Journal, James Mackintosh gets some surprising front-page treatment for a dovish take on inflation: If core inflation came in just below 3%, the Federal Reserve would breathe a huge sigh of relief....It isn’t merely a dream: Measure U.S. price changes the way Europe does, and inflation was already there in ...continue reading "Inflation is over — if you calculate it the way Europe does"

Philip Tetlock's Forecasting Research Institute conducted an exercise last year on the topic of human extinction events. Why? Who knows. Their report was released yesterday and, long story short, a group of various experts predicted a roughly 10-20% chance of catastrophe by 2100 (10% of human race dies) and a 1-6% chance of total extinction ...continue reading "Some AI experts are really rattled by the whole extinction thing"

Well, this is weird. A few years ago police investigators found out that four state troopers in Connecticut had been entering fake traffic tickets into an internal police database: Four troopers had collectively entered at least 636 fake tickets into the state police computer system over a nine-month stretch to make it appear they were ...continue reading "Need to improve your racial profiling image? Just issue a bunch of fake tickets to white people."

Flyers crossing into the international terminal at LAX.

The city of Los Angeles is thinking about starting up a public bank: The City Council voted in October 2021 to study the viability of forming a city-owned bank and to create a business plan for doing so. With new political leadership and support from a number of community organizations, the city is now preparing ...continue reading "Los Angeles probably doesn’t need a public bank"