Kevin Drum 🕸

Two people in two days have told me that NextDoor is aflame with outrage about the price of natural gas. And that's hardly surprising: here in California gas bills for December ranged from double to triple the normal rate. People who normally have gas bills of $100 or so are reporting bills of $200-$500 depending ...continue reading "Here’s why natural gas prices are so high in California"

Paul Krugman asks today: Stagflation or Soft Landing? It Depends Who You Ask. Hang on a second, pardner. There's also a third option: a plain, old-fashioned recession that lasts a year or so. This is my best guess right now because the Fed's interest rate hikes will start to affect things in a few months ...continue reading "A recession is coming our way"

According to my bird buddy, this is a lazuli bunting female Mountain Bluebird. I found her hopping around the trail markers at Quail Hill park, one of the open-space preserves in this neck of Orange County. The top photo is a good overall picture of our little bluebird. The middle picture shows that it's not ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Here are all of the standard economic indicators that affect people in their daily lives. They look pretty solid! Growth rates are all annualized. NOTE: Will everything stay this sunny? I'm a recession hawk myself, so I doubt it. We'll know in about six months.

Are wages skyrocketing so strongly that the Fed needs to continue crushing the economy until workers understand who's the real boss? Let's look at today's latest data: The Employment Cost Index measures the total cost of employing someone: wages, taxes, office space, health care, etc. In the last quarter it went up at an annualized ...continue reading "The cost of employment rose less than 1% last quarter"

I was piddling around with something related to the Tyre Nichols killing—I don't quite remember what—and decided to look at police killings by both race and age. We all know that Black people are killed at much higher rates relative to population than white people, but it turns out that the difference depends a lot ...continue reading "Police shootings by race and age are . . . a little weird"

Here's what the latest NBC poll has to say about what Congress should be doing this year: Normally polls like this are kind of worthless because the crosstabs invariably tell us that 100% of Democrats think one thing and 100% of Republicans think the opposite. Not exactly news. But when you get to the edges, ...continue reading "The American people want immigration reform. They don’t want abortion restrictions."

I am amused by this chart on international obesity rates: Every country in the top 15 uses weights based on measured data. But what happens when you ask people to self-report their weights (red asterisks in the chart)? Their countries all end up in the bottom 20. This is why anything based on self-reporting should ...continue reading "Raw (?) data: International obesity rates"

This is what poor old Notre Dame looks like these days. Maybe if we come back to Paris for the Olympics they'll have it all fixed up for us.

John Herrman says that Amazon still works pretty well for most people: But, at the core of that experience, something has become unignorably worse. Late last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon’s customer satisfaction had fallen sharply in a range of recent surveys, which cited COVID-related delivery interruptions but also poor search results ...continue reading "Amazon has a junk problem. And a search problem."

The Wall Street Journal reports today that "The U.S. Consumer Is Starting to Freak Out." Let's take a look! Spending on durable goods, like cars and washing machines, soared during the pandemic and has since flattened out. But it's still way above its pre-pandemic level. Spending on nondurable goods, like clothes and food, also declined ...continue reading "Consumers aren’t freaking out. But maybe they should be."

"Defund the police" may be a rallying cry for some, but what's happened in real life? Just the opposite: The data for 2021-22 represents my best estimate put together from a variety of sources. The number of police officers does seem to have been cut back in 2021, but not because of George Floyd. It ...continue reading "Defund the police? Hardly."

The Wall Street Journal has a rather remarkable story this weekend about CGT, the French union that represents workers in the power industry. Apparently they've taken to cutting off electricity to specific individuals as a protest against proposals to pare back the French pension system. The most curious thing about this is that everyone seems ...continue reading "France’s retirement system is unfair. So is everyone else’s."

Dana Milbank summarizes the state of Republican budget negotiations: House Republicans are saying they’re willing to risk default — an economic disaster — unless Biden agrees to cuts. But they won’t specify which cuts they want; Biden will just have to guess. “I want to look the president in the eye and tell me there’s ...continue reading "Republicans want to cut assistance to poor people. Any other questions?"

The Washington Examiner does a little examining today: The salary for Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has nearly doubled during her six-year tenure on the job. McDaniel, who was elected as chairwoman in 2017, was paid $122,582 in her first year but made $358,431 from January 2022 through November 2022, according to Federal Election ...continue reading "Ronna McDaniel wins fourth term as RNC chair. Will she also get another raise?"

Yesterday was a fine day with some Santa Ana winds blowing, which had the cats acting kind of squirrelly. Hilbert went out to the front yard and took possession of the sunny rock—his by right as king of the garden—and then Charlie decided to check out the rock too. Naturally he did this by sticking ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 27 January 2023"

For the sake of completeness, here's the consumer spending data from today's PCE report: Spending was down 3.4% compared to November (note that this is seasonally adjusted, so it accounts for higher average holiday spending). Is this a sign of economic slowdown? Maybe. On the other hand, spending is still above the pre-pandemic trendline, and ...continue reading "Consumer spending was down slightly in December"

Elon Musk was in Washington DC last night to— Well, it's not clear exactly what he was there to do. The Washington Post explains: “Just met with Speaker McCarthy & Rep Jeffries to discuss ensuring that this platform is fair to both parties,” Musk tweeted Thursday evening. ....It remains unclear whether the main purpose of ...continue reading "Elon Musk goes to Capitol to kowtow to Republicans"

Today the BEA released inflation figures for December, and there was both good news and bad news: Headline PCE inflation dropped nearly to zero in December. That's the good news. However, core PCE inflation ticked up a bit to 3.5%. That's not terrible, but it does indicate that core inflation is dropping at a pretty ...continue reading "PCE inflation drops to 0.6% in December"

Today's big New York Times piece about the Durham investigation is chock full of goodies about how Donald Trump and his lackeys desperately tried to prove that the FBI had illegally opened an investigation of Trump for no good reason. Attorney General Bill Barr and his special counsel, John Durham, were obsessed about this and ...continue reading "The Durham investigation has been a fiasco from start to finish"