Kevin Drum 🕸

I was thinking once again about the myth of deadlock the other day, and in particular I was thinking about what Joe Biden has managed to get done in his first 18 months. Here's a list of big things, ranked from top to bottom: Afghanistan withdrawal $1.9 trillion COVID stimulus Infrastructure bill Rallying the world ...continue reading "Joe Biden’s greatest accomplishment so far is . . ."

Here's the average price of gasoline as of August 1: Adjusted for inflation, the price of a gallon of gasoline has dropped nearly a dollar. Isn't that great? The are only two kinds of people unhappy about this. The first are climate hawks who think gasoline should be going for about ten bucks a gallon ...continue reading "Gasoline prices just keep plummeting"

WARNING: I have deleted the original version of this post and replaced it with something completely different. Sorry. Shall I never be rid of this stupid topic? I'm talking, of course, about the reallocation of veterans funds from the discretionary budget to the mandatory budget. Here's where I am now. The Congressional Budget Office examined ...continue reading "Wait! Again. It was really the Senate that played games with the PACT Act"

Yikes. This PACT Act business is complicated. But I think I finally have it right. The Republican complaint about the bill is that it moves $400 billion from discretionary spending to mandatory spending. I explain why that matters here. Then I took a closer look and concluded that the reallocation was introduced in the Senate ...continue reading "Wait! It was the House that played PACT games, not the Senate"

This is a young man reading a book at the very tip of the Île de la Cité, the island in the middle of the Seine that was the original site of Paris. I had never walked out to the very end, so I decided to do it this time. Maybe next time I'll see ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

The Wall Street Journal had this story splashed across its front page last night: Methinks the Journal is trying too hard. It's true that white workers get more career-advancing opportunities than POCs according to this McKinsey report, but the numbers are 55%, 60%, and 62% compared to a white baseline number of 64%. If there's ...continue reading "Front line workers of color are doing pretty well these days"

You have questions. I have answers. Yesterday I wrote about Sen. Pat Toomey's opposition to the PACT Act, which funds health care for veterans who were exposed to toxic burn pits and other environmental hazards while serving in the military. Toomey doesn't object to the overall intent of the bill, but he does object to ...continue reading "Who changed the PACT Act?"

Yesterday Jon Stewart spent the day delivering expletive-laden rants against Republicans for blocking the PACT Act. But Republicans say they have good reason to block it until a teensy weensy little change is made. Who's right? Fine. I'll start. What's this bill all about? It creates $280 billion in new funding for veterans who have ...continue reading "Who exactly is sabotaging the PACT Act?"

On Friday, NPR's Marketplace ran this headline: "Eviction filings hit pre-pandemic levels a year after the end of the moratorium." The evidence presented is slim—which is hardly surprising since data on evictions is all but nonexistent in the US. Eviction is a local court action and the county numbers aren't aggregated by any federal agency. ...continue reading "Evictions are returning to near their normal, pre-pandemic levels"

I've seen a number of people express astonishment about how we decide when recessions start. It turns out that the answer has nothing to do with two consecutive quarters of GDP decline and it never has. Rather, a group of gnomes who work for the National Bureau of Economic Research stir a bunch of stuff ...continue reading "Are we in a recession or not? You can decide for yourself!"

This chart comes from Scott Hechinger, who got it from Bloomberg: The rate of shootings has actually gone down a bit over the past year, but when Eric Adams took over as mayor (in January) media coverage of shootings suddenly skyrocketed. So now everyone is scared about their safety even though there's little reason to ...continue reading "The crime surge in New York City is beyond belief. Literally."

I started laughing about halfway through today's Washington Post story about the deletion of Secret Service text messages from the days surrounding the 1/6 insurrection. It took that long to fully appreciate the thesaurus woo of reporters Drew Harwell, Will Oremus and Joseph Menn. Here's a list of the words and phrases they use to ...continue reading "What’s the best word to describe the Secret Service’s loss of text messages?"

Here is Hilbert sprawled across the newspaper this morning as Marian is attempting to solve her puzzles. In the background, Charlie is waiting for a chance to pounce.

We all have our favorites, and Obamacare is one of mine. So I was very happy to see that, against all odds, the latest version of the Democratic spending bill¹ includes a three-year extension of the expanded ACA subsidies originally introduced last year in the American Rescue Plan. These subsidies ensure that no one has ...continue reading "Obamacare gets a boost in the Inflation Reduction Act"

For chrissake: Neither worker pay nor benefits grew at anything close to a record pace last quarter unless you insist on never adjusting anything for inflation. Here's what total compensation for workers looks like over the past two years: Since the beginning of 2021, ECI has risen 6% while inflation has gone up 11%. Employers ...continue reading "Worker pay and benefits are falling"

Uh oh: As usual, monthly changes are volatile and no single month should be taken as definitive of long-term inflation trends. Still, this isn't good news. I'm not sure what suddenly happened in June, but the core inflation rate nearly doubled compared to May. In addition, disposable income dropped 3.6% on an annualized basis, while ...continue reading "Inflation is up and income is down. Ugh."

I'm not a big fan of formal French gardens, but if you're going to see one I suppose Versailles is the pinnacle of the art. When we were there the famous fountains weren't running because they only operate them on weekends. I don't get that. Sure, back in the day they were an engineering marvel, ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

It looks like the Atlanta Fed's forecasting prowess was pretty good for second quarter GDP: Real GDP declined 0.9% on an annualized basis, so we now have two consecutive quarters of contraction. On the bright side, real GDP was up 1.6% compared to a year earlier. Down in the details, none of this can be ...continue reading "GDP shrinks 0.9% in the second quarter"

So how is Russia doing these days? Tyler Cowen points us to a paper from the Yale School of Management that says the Russian economy is in terrible shape: Our team of experts, using private Russian language and unconventional data sources including high frequency consumer data, cross-channel checks, releases from Russia’s international trade partners, and ...continue reading "How long can the Russian economy hold out amid crippling sanctions?"

Interesting times: The Senate has passed the $280 billion chips bill and the House will soon follow. Keep in mind that it's actually about $80 billion for chips and $200 billion to fund 20 "regional technology hubs" for general research into artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing and other cool-sounding futuristic stuff. Also keep in mind ...continue reading "Stuff is getting done. Is it the start of a trend?"