Kevin Drum 🕸

Social Security recipients are due for a whopping 8.7% increase in January, and since I'm currently a Social Security recipient that makes me very happy. But how has Social Security been doing over the years? The BLS tracks a research version of CPI called CPI-E (for elderly) that measures CPI specifically for the basket of ...continue reading "Social Security recipients are getting a big raise next year, but is it enough?"

According to Politico, South Dakota's upcoming approval of Medicaid expansion is likely to be the last one for quite a while. So this is the Medicaid map we're going to have for at least the next few years: The Black population makes up 14.2% of the entire United States. You will be unsurprised to learn ...continue reading "Medicaid expansion is about to grind to a halt"

Advance retail sales figures for September are out today. And just to be different, I'm reporting them adjusted for both inflation and population growth, annualized into a full-year spending figure. Ordinary newspapers will tell you that retail sales were flat compared to last month, but only this blog will take the next step and adjust ...continue reading "Real per-capita retail sales dropped 0.4% in September"

I mentioned a few days ago that national crime statistics are hopelessly useless right now, so we don't really know how much crime has gone up or down across the country. However, we do have crime stats for several big cities, and the one that's getting the most attention right now is New York. So ...continue reading "Crime!"

This is a sculpture in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles. It's pretty beat up and I have no idea what it's supposed to be of. For some reason, though, it continues to intrigue me every time I look at it. So here it is for the rest of you.

Even with inflation taking less of a bite than earlier in the year, real hourly wages declined yet again in September: Since the beginning of 2021, hourly earnings are down $1.42. For blue-collar workers, hourly wages are down 73¢. Wages have now fully declined to their pre-pandemic level: Wages are obviously not pushing up inflation. ...continue reading "Wages were down once again in September"

The BLS announced the CPI for September today, and the month-over-month figure was quite a bit higher than it was last month: On a year-over-year basis, headline inflation came in at 8.2%, the same as last month. Core CPI rang in at 6.6%. As always, though, the trendline is the thing to watch. The trend ...continue reading "September inflation remains stubbornly elevated"

Enough time has now passed that we can take a good look at how men and women responded to getting back to work after the pandemic: In 2016 women began entering the workforce at a higher rate than men. At the start of the pandemic, however, they lost more than men: a 4.6 point drop ...continue reading "Raw data: Men and women after the pandemic"

Donald Trump's problems with the law have certainly heated up in the past couple of days. Here's what we've learned: On January 6, Donald Trump was desperate to march on the Capitol with the mob, but the Secret Service directly disobeyed him and refused. Surveillance video shows a Trump aide moving boxes out of a ...continue reading "Donald Trump is careening down a rabbit hole of legal pain"

Mike Huckabee explained to Sean Hannity on Wednesday why polls are underestimating the MAGA vote: Right now if you’re pro-life, if you’re Christian, if you’re a conservative, if you are a MAGA Republican, which means you just think that America’s a great country and we ought to preserve it and protect it and pass it ...continue reading "Do MAGA Republicans live in a state of constant fear?"

Who says the Dodgers lost tonight? I mean, some of the Dodgers lost, but the concession workers had a pretty good day: The wages for almost every one of the more than 1,500 workers covered under the contract will increase at least $10 per hour over the next two years, said Susan Minato, co-president of ...continue reading "Dodgers win!"

In the bellwether region of Southern California, home prices just keep on dropping: In September, the typical home price for the six-county region dropped 0.6% from August to $817,316, marking the fourth consecutive month that prices declined from the prior month. ....Other measures of home prices, including data from mortgage services firm Black Knight and ...continue reading "Housing prices continue to fall in Southern California"

This is one of the entrances to the Madeleine metro stop in Paris. I was fascinated by the three-tier escalator and tried over and over to get a picture of it. The problem is that it had to be a panorama, and Photoshop continually refused to stitch all the individual shots together. Eventually, on about ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Jon Chait attended this year's National Conservatism Conference in Miami and reports that the American right has gone gaga over Hungary's Viktor Orbán and his brand of semi-fascism: Almost every speaker repeated a version of the following: The “woke” revolution has captured the commanding heights of American education, culture, and even large businesses, from which ...continue reading "Republicans need to look in a mirror more often"

Yesterday at National Review I saw yet another denunciation of Joe Biden's savage assault on the Constitution. The guy is taking a torch to it! The country is doomed if he keeps it up! Sadly, I had run out of my free access to NR articles for the month—seems a little early for that, doesn't ...continue reading "The Constitution is . . . yawn . . . under assault again"

Tomorrow is inflation day! But while we all wait anxiously for the latest CPI numbers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is teasing us today with PPI numbers. That's the producer price index, and it estimates the prices companies have to pay for their raw inputs. Here it is: Overall PPI growth returned to positive territory ...continue reading "Core PPI remains low in September"

This is Los Angeles City Hall at night in a photo taken from Union Station.

After I finished looking up data for employment levels this morning I decided to browse through all the various measures of unemployment just to see if there was anything interesting there. And there was! As you know, the headline unemployment rate has already dropped to an all-time low: The same is true no matter how ...continue reading "Why is unemployment lasting so long these days?"

Is this new news, or have I just never noticed it before? The president absorbed withering criticism for visiting Saudi Arabia in July and giving a fist bump to its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman....While no specific announcements were made during his visit to Jeddah in July, American officials said at the time that they ...continue reading "Wait. Biden is mad at the Saudis because they sided with Republicans?"

I've mentioned this before, but the divergence between the establishment and household surveys of employment has continued to grow: Over the past six months, the establishment survey says that employment has grown by 2.1 million, or 350,000 per month. This is the headline number reported every month. Conversely, the household survey says that employment has ...continue reading "Maybe job growth isn’t as great as we think"