Kevin Drum 🕸

Business formation continues to grow like gangbusters: New business applications are up 6% from last month and 15% from a year ago. I don't know what's going on with this, but it certainly suggests that the economy looks awfully good to a lot of people.

California's infamous CEQA—the California Environmental Quality Act—has been around for more than 50 years. It's a product of the late '60s, when environmental concerns over big corporate construction projects first emerged as a major issue and Californians decided they wanted to do something to rein them in. Today it's much hated by housing advocates because ...continue reading "Here’s why California’s terrible environmental law is less terrible than you think"

During the pandemic there was a lot of conversation about child care services and how badly they'd been affected. But the reality is a little different. Here is total revenue for the child care industry over the past decade: Child care services briefly dropped by a third at the start of the pandemic, but had ...continue reading "Raw data: Child care during the pandemic"

Here's an interesting little tidbit about religion in America. Devin Pope of the University of Chicago has been tracking church attendance using cell phone data that tells us whether you're really in church, and his results are remarkably consistent: Week in and week out, there are roughly 25 million Americans at church each Sunday. Note ...continue reading "How many people really attend church?"

Vehicle miles traveled per adult peaked in 2004 and has fallen pretty steadily since then. By 2022 it had partly recovered from its pandemic dip but was still 10% below the 2004 peak.

Last year Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis decided he needed to revive the old State Guard under his personal command—in order, he said, "to respond to a projected active hurricane season." In particular: In a natural disaster-prone state such as Florida with a potentially active hurricane season on the horizon, there is a clear and present ...continue reading "DeSantis’s personal guard: Fewer hurricanes, more immigration stunts"

What really happened with Sweden and COVID-19? The story is a little more complicated than you usually hear, but you don't have to get too deep in the weeds to see that something interesting happened there. Start off in 2020, when the pandemic begins and Sweden adopts the most hands-off policy of any peer nation. ...continue reading "What’s the real story with Sweden and COVID-19?"

Can someone tell me what's going on with this headline in the Washington Post today? This turns out to be a routine kind of story we've all read a dozen times. It's about a feud between neighbors that spirals out of control and becomes completely insane. What it's not about is the fact that one ...continue reading "Washington Post pretends routine feud is about being gay. Why?"

It's natural for Republicans to dislike the Democratic agenda and vice versa. But check out these Republican quotes from a Wall Street Journal story today: “It’s like half the country has lost their minds. People don’t even know what gender they are.”...If Republicans lose again, “it’s going to be the downfall of our society.” “We ...continue reading "The Republican apocalypse"

I'm hesitant to post this chart, because it comes from a source I'm unfamiliar with and don't know if I can trust. But it seems both interesting and plausible. Zach Goldberg of the Manhattan Institute combined the answers to a whole slew of mental hygiene questions into a single index of teen mental health, and ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Teen mental health has plummeted"

Catherine Rampell says that if we achieve the coveted economic soft landing, it won't be because of anything radical we did: It will be because of boring, standard economic textbook fixes for inflation: i.e., supply shocks subsiding, fiscal support fading and, most controversially, interest rates rising. The Federal Reserve’s 10 rate hikes since March 2022 ...continue reading "Fed hikes haven’t slowed the economy—yet"

I never expected to get dragged down the rabbit hole yet again of Mississippi's "reading miracle," but I have no choice. It looks like I might have been wrong again. Sigh. Let's recap: In 2013 Mississippi passed a new law that focused on teaching phonics in elementary school. The results were impressive. After the law ...continue reading "Mississippi revisited: The Mississippi reading miracle looks to be real after all"

Just sayin': I know that some of you think I'm crazy for constantly adjusting everything in the world for inflation, but with rare exceptions it's always the right thing to do. Even for the stock market. If it's going up but not even beating inflation, then it's not really doing that great, is it? Anyway, ...continue reading "A different look at the amazing bull market"

Remember that lunatic judge last week who decided the federal government was censoring right-wing views and banned them from talking to social media? His order was appealed and today the 5th Circuit issued, with no comment, an emergency stay. Routine cooperation about election security and other issues can now resume. Although the 5th Circuit is ...continue reading "Lunatic judge in censorship case is sent packing"

Moms for Liberty is a group of Republican women whose goal is to elect conservatives to school boards around the country. This is nothing new. Republican women did the same thing in the early '60s to fight communism in schools; again in the '80s after Anita Bryant inspired the Moral Majority to fight gays in ...continue reading "Conservatives and school boards: We’ve seen this movie before"

Here are Hilbert and a watchful rabbit relaxing in the shade of the front porch. Hilbert likes to come out here so he can keep an eye on the world (from a safe distance).

One of the things that's helped bring inflation down is a sustained drop in the cost of imports. Take a look at the latest figures: Starting in February, the supply chain pressure index went negative, indicating that supply chain issues were all but gone. At the same time, imports became deflationary. They didn't just flatten: ...continue reading "Imports are getting cheaper and cheaper"

In 2021, when inflation started to take off, there were two opposing sides: Team Transitory and Team Structural. In particular, Team Transitory believed that taming inflation didn't need a lot of help from the Fed because it was fundamentally the result of temporary pandemic supply shocks that would fade on their own. I've been on ...continue reading "Team Transitory has been right all along—but way too optimistic"

Rep. Eli Crane, who looks and sounds disturbingly like a Batman villain, yesterday introduced an anti-woke amendment to the military funding bill that would prohibit "race, gender, religion, or political affiliations, or any other ideological concepts as the sole basis for recruitment, training education, promotion, or retention decisions." Then he dug himself a further hole ...continue reading "Raw data: What the Army looks like these days"

I was under the impression that Twitter had lost most of its ad revenue, but I guess it's using whatever's left to reward some of its star content creators: On Thursday, Twitter announced that it would begin sharing ad revenue with content creators on its platform for the first time.....The first beneficiaries appear to be ...continue reading "Twitter pays Andrew Tate for his keen social insights"