Kevin Drum 🕸

For the second month in a row, PCE inflation stayed below 3%: Both core and headline PCE came in at 2.6% on a month-over-month basis. On a year-over-year basis, headline PCE was 3.3% and core inflation was 4.2%. Core PCE, which is the Fed's favored measure, shows every sign of being well under 3% on ...continue reading "PCE inflation stays below 3% in July"

This is the Southern California shoreline around Santa Monica near sunset. I took it out of the airplane window on our flight out of LAX to France last year.

When Janet Protasiewicz ran for a seat on Wisconsin's Supreme Court, she campaigned on an explicit promise to reconsider the state's egregiously gerrymandered legislative map. Voters approved and swept her into office by a wide margin. This gave Democrats a majority on the court, which means there's a chance of drawing fair districts after years ...continue reading "Wisconsin GOP threatens to use its gerrymander to keep its gerrymander"

A few weeks ago Rudy Giuliani entered a stipulation in a defamation case against him from two Georgia election workers. The stipulation stated that he had indeed said false things about them, but it was followed by a bizarre effort to claim that the stipulation didn't really mean he had said anything wrong. He was ...continue reading "Judge finally loses patience with Rudy Giuliani"

Nonfinancial corporate profits remained elevated in Q2 but were flat compared to Q1: The pandemic turned out to be great for corporations, if for no one else, but the last few quarters have shown a slow decline since profits peaked in mid-2022. I wouldn't be surprised to see a further decline in Q3.

David Wallace-Wells is at the helm of Ezra Klein's podcast today and talks about "pandemic revisionism" with Katelyn Jetelin. It took them quite a while to get around to the topic of what worked and what didn't—thank God for transcripts!—and when we finally got there we were still left with no answers: We know vaccination ...continue reading "We still don’t know how to stop a pandemic"

I've showed you St. Michael's Abbey before, shortly after it opened in 2021. Here it is again in a different view, framed by cactus and oak trees and lit up by the late afternoon sun.

Franklin Foer has written a book about the first two years of the Biden administration. Part of the book is about Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan: By the end of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, President Joe Biden was sure he made the right decision after watching the events unfold in the Situation ...continue reading "Quote of the day: “Either the press is losing its mind or I am.”"

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"