Kevin Drum 🕸

The Wall Street Journal has an inexplicably fascinating story about gambling in Las Vegas today. I've long been accustomed to hearing about microscopic changes in gambling rules to favor either the house or (via negotiation) high rollers, but now casinos have thrown all their subtlety out the window. For example, if you hit 21 on ...continue reading "Life is very, very good in Las Vegas right now"

Today really is the start of the French Open, so here's a pair of pictures of Court Simonne Mathieu, the newest of the courts at Roland Garros. As you can see in the top picture, it's a sunken court. The entrance leads to the top level, not the bottom. The bottom picture shows the court ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

An op-ed in the New York Times today caught my eye: "The Real Reason Your Groceries Are Getting So Expensive." This got me curious: are groceries getting more expensive? I haven't checked for a while. Here's the answer: Food inflation peaked in early 2022 but it's been plummeting since then. Groceries are still more expensive ...continue reading "Grocery prices are going down"

Just as a minor historical note about the debt ceiling, it has been killed off before—for nearly 15 years. Dick Gephardt did it in 1979: He consulted the parliamentarian. "I asked if there was a way that when we pass the budget [the debt ceiling] can be deemed 'raised' to accommodate the budget people are ...continue reading "We haven’t always had a debt ceiling"

A new study of online news in 2020 has produced some dramatic—if unsurprising—results about consumption of misinformation between conservatives and liberals. It's a little complicated so I've split it into multiple simpler charts. Here's the first one: The top set of points shows raw exposure: it's what Google shows you when you perform a search. ...continue reading "Conservatives actively want to believe only lies"

I don't have any special reason for posting this. It just seems like something we should all be reminded of from time to time.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is almost comically corrupt. He's been under federal indictment for securities fraud since 2015. In 2020 whistleblowers accused him of abusing his office to help a wealthy donor. Last year he requested state funds to pay off the whistleblowers, who had accused him of retaliating against them: Among the allegations ...continue reading "What’s the deal with Ken Paxton?"

Apparently a debt ceiling deal has been reached. There's surprisingly little to it, chiefly a freezing of domestic spending in next year's budget. At a guess, this means cuts of maybe 3-4% after you adjust for inflation. In the following year, spending would increase 1%, which probably represents further cuts of 1-2% after inflation. So ...continue reading "Debt ceiling deal cuts domestic spending about 5%"

A couple of days ago Farhad Manjoo wrote that office workers aren't sick of work, they're sick of the commute to work: For many, the pandemic-era shift to remote work proved that all the schlepping was unnecessary....They can get a lot more done — in their work lives and in the rest of their lives ...continue reading "Commuters are back on the commute"

It's worth going back in time a few months and remembering why the debt ceiling even still exists. Why wasn't it raised unilaterally by Democrats during the November/December lame duck session? Janet Yellen was certainly in favor. Technically, the debt ceiling could have been increased easily via reconciliation. The procedure is straightforward: It starts with ...continue reading "The debt ceiling fiasco is Joe Manchin’s fault"

It's Day 31, more than twice as long as I expected to stay in treatment. But we're home now. Earlier today I had my final consult and everything is going swimmingly. My counts are completely normal; the Bell's palsy is diagnostically gone, though I still feel a few twinges; and my doctor says I'm responding ...continue reading "Health update"

Our stay at City of Hope has stretched out so long that I'm finally running out of cat pictures. So here's a rare file photo of Hilbert and Charlie playing back when Charlie was still sort of kittenish.

Tyler Cowen points me to some truly remarkable research today. The topic is the pay and productivity of women in a large multinational corporation with offices and factories around the world. The central insight of the study is that if women face high barriers to entry into the labor market, then only the best, most ...continue reading "Women around the world aren’t paid nearly enough"

It's inflation day, and the news is once again so-so: Both core and headline PCE inflation clocked in at around 4.5%, though the headline rate continues to be considerably lower on a trendline basis. Overall, though, it was mostly sideways movement in April. PCE inflation has stayed pretty steady since the end of last year. ...continue reading "Inflation holds steady in April"

NBC News reports that state officials working for Ron DeSantis are soliciting campaign contributions from lobbyists with business before the state: NBC News spoke with 10 Republican lobbyists in Florida, all of whom said they couldn't remember being solicited for donations so overtly by administration officials — especially at a time when the governor still ...continue reading "Ron DeSantis really wants your money"

The Supreme Court today severely curtailed the EPA's ability to regulate wetlands under the Clean Water Act. This was a genuinely complicated case, but the big problem is that the court majority was able to do its work only by twisting the clear instructions of Congress. The CWA defines wetlands as anything "adjacent" to lakes, ...continue reading "Supreme Court blows off Congress in wetlands case"

Sunset and fast food on the Louisiana bayou.

According to the Wall Street Journal, same-sex couples account for 1% of all households nationwide. Of that, half are married and a little less than half are unmarried partners. The remainder live alone or in other arrangements.

The American economy is in very squirrely shape right now. I have two things to show you that demonstrate how weird things are. First, you may recall that there are two basic measures of economic growth: GDP and GDI. They are theoretically identical, but in practice they diverge—sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. For that ...continue reading "The US economy is a riddle wrapped in an enigma"

Over at the Washington Monthly, Robert Shapiro argues that Americans—and Democrats in particular—should be more aware of big wage gains over the past year. It's something to brag about. The problem is that it really isn't true. There are several common ways of measuring wages, and nearly all of them show no gains at all ...continue reading "Earnings are not up"