Kevin Drum 🕸

Tomorrow is a big day: the BEA will announce GDP for the second quarter and then we can all spend the rest of the day arguing about whether we're in a recession. Here's the forecast from the Atlanta Fed: This will be a good test of the Atlanta Fed's GDPNow algorithms. They predict that GDP ...continue reading "The latest GDP release is barreling toward us tomorrow"

A study in blue at Laguna Beach.

The BLS released its latest count of job gains and losses today. Here's the net number: This comes to a net job loss over 2020-21 of about 2.6 million jobs. The PAYEMS series puts it at 2.9 million jobs. The employment level data shows a loss of 2.5 million jobs. So everyone is on the ...continue reading "Job gains are going up, up, up"

Here you go: the worst airports in the world during this, the worst summer for travel in a long time: Not a bad showing from the US! Chicago Midway and Orlando are hardly showpiece airports, after all. However, the next set of 20 airports is a little more US-centric (JKF, Baltimore, Newark, Las Vegas, Charlotte, ...continue reading "Raw data: The top 20 worst airports in the world"

Donald Luskin writes in the Wall Street Journal today that inflation is going to take care of itself and there's no need for the Fed to touch off a recession in order to rein it in. Luskin's argument is that inflation is caused by an increase in the money supply—three huge stimulus bills in this ...continue reading "Did Donald Luskin get it right about inflation today?"

This chart shows the growth rate of the 22 largest cities in America. Note that these are actually MSAs, Metropolitan Statistical Areas, and include most of the suburbs that surround the cities. The only two cities that have lost population since 1970 are Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Detroit cut it close, but squeaked by with a ...continue reading "Raw data: The fastest growing cities in the United States"

This is Captain Lionel Birger on the bridge of the Viking Skaga. Captain Birger was a serious guy, which I suppose is all for the good. After all, I don't really want to socialize with the captain of my ship. I just want him to drive carefully and get me home without a scratch. Which ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Over at my old stomping grounds, Dan Friedman reports on the latest tape-recorded sleaze from Steve Bannon: Aiming to hurt Joe Biden’s chances and at least narrow the election results, Bannon ensured that sexually explicit material from Hunter Biden’s laptop was widely publicized. For that, he enlisted help from his patron, exiled Chinese mogul Guo ...continue reading "Steve Bannon is a creep"

I was puttering around tonight looking at life expectancy, and I happened to come across this table in a paper from a few years ago: At the top, smoking and obesity matter a lot. This is not big news. In the middle you have a bunch of stuff that's fairly close to a zero correlation. ...continue reading "In poor neighborhoods, immigrants have the highest life expectancies"

I'm an idiot. I got into a Twitter beef about housing and now I feel like I have a point to get off my chest. It's this: there's no such thing as a shortage, full stop. There are only shortages at a particular price. Price, as it always has been, is the great mediator between ...continue reading "How much housing do we need?"

A few weeks ago, coming home from one of my night sky photography sessions, I noticed that dawn looked very nice in my rear view mirror. I wasn't planning to stop, but eventually I caved in and decided to turn around. Having done that, I needed to find an exit so I could get out ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

The Washington Post writes today that Millennials fled the workforce when they were teens but that Gen Z teens are pouring back. Regular readers of this blog are ahead of the curve here, since I pointed out three months ago that Gen Z, on average, seems to like work more than previous generations. But how ...continue reading "Wait! Is Gen X the real slacker generation?"

Riddle me this: what happened to the United States during the aughts? If you ask people how the nation is doing, it normally depends almost entirely on the economy. If we're in a recession, America is going in the wrong direction. If the economy is expanding, America is going in the right direction. We aren't ...continue reading "The Aughts"

Over at National Review, Charles Hilu is pissed: Incoming University of Michigan Medical School students staged a walkout of the school’s White Coat Ceremony Sunday to protest the choice of a pro-life doctor as the ceremony’s keynote speaker. ....On its face, this collective decision by many of the incoming students is inappropriate for civil society ...continue reading "Is walking out on a speaker no longer allowed?"

Inspired by a Twitter conversation last night, here's the answer: As of now, about 3 million people work for the federal government; 5 million for state governments; and 14 million for local governments.

Rep. Lee Zeldin is running for governor of New York. Yesterday, as he was talking to a small crowd about public safety, a drunk guy apparently got tired of listening to him: Video footage of the encounter showed Mr. Jakubonis wielding a pointed plastic self-defense tool shaped like the face of a cartoon cat as ...continue reading "Cat-shaped thing implicated in New York attack"

Over at National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty looks at the decline of marriage in the US and places some of blame on the LGBT movement in general and the Supreme Court's 2015 Obergefell decision in particular: Proponents of same-sex marriage like Sullivan and Rauch won in the courts, and in a thin slice of the ...continue reading "Marriage in the US has been declining since 1949"

This is Charlie about to attack Hilbert's tail—though Charlie is hardly to blame for this. There are, after all, limits to what you can expect when you start waving your tail in somebody's face.

I don't have any special reason for posting this. I was just curious about it.

Hey! I wrote this afternoon about the FCC shutting down all those fake auto warranty robocalls, but I missed the big story: This is about all robocalls, not just the auto warranty guys. Years ago I remember writing about STIR/SHAKEN, a protocol for verified caller ID that the FCC was working on, but then I ...continue reading "Bye bye to all robocalls?"