Kevin Drum 🕸

Here is brave Sir Hilbert fleeing from the silent approach of the Gray Knight, whose tail you can see sticking up above the tall grasses. The backstory is simplicity itself: Hilbert and Charlie were playing over in our neighbor's yard and Charlie decided to sneak up on Hilbert—one of his favorite activities. Hilbert, as usual, ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 16 September 2022"

Writing about inflation, Paul Krugman says: While interest rates have risen a lot this year, they haven’t yet had much effect on the real economy. Never mind claims that we’re in a recession; the reality is that unemployment is still near a historic low, and other measures, like the number of job vacancies, suggest that ...continue reading "We really, really don’t need a huge recession"

My memory must be getting worse. This week I'm two days late with my usual gasoline chart: But wait! This isn't my usual chart. What happened to the orange line representing the inflation-adjusted price? Here's the deal: inflation figures are always a month or two behind, so I have to estimate recent inflation based on ...continue reading "Gasoline was down another nickel last week"

Back in the day I used to tell people that if they wanted to understand a particular segment of the working class they needed to read supermarket tabloids. Aside from the endless celebrity gossip, the tabs embraced a political view that I'd call not ideologically conservative, but "common sense" conservative. That is, it was stuff ...continue reading "In the National Enquirer’s universe, Joe Biden is unhinged and demented"

I haven't seen this confirmed anywhere, so for now I'll put it into the "interesting if true" bucket: The Russian government is administering an across-the-board cut of 10% in budgetary expenses. This is in reaction to a larger-than-expected decline of fiscal revenues over the summer (a deficit of close to 1.5 trillion rubles). This is ...continue reading "Russian revenues are being hit hard by the war in Ukraine"

This is supposed to be a Michaelmas daisy, but Wikipedia informs me that the Michaelmas is part of the aster genus, which by decree is now found only in Eurasia: "After morphologic and molecular research on the genus during the 1990s, it was decided that the North American species are better treated in a series ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

The railroad strike has been averted at the last second: Freight rail companies and unions representing tens of thousands of workers reached a tentative agreement to avoid what would have been an economically damaging strike, a relief for businesses and consumers and a win for President Biden, whose administration helped broker the deal. The breakthrough ...continue reading "Railroad strike averted! All hail President Biden!"

Here is the latest release of the data on retail sales: There's nothing much to report, literally. Retail sales growth has been almost completely flat since February and it continued that trend in August, rising only 0.7% from the previous month on an annualized basis. This suggests that Americans are on a fairly even keel ...continue reading "Retail sales are once again flat in August"

People are often badly mistaken about how much the average person earns in the United States. So as a public service, here's a series of charts based on yesterday's release of 2021 income levels from the Census Bureau. The top chart is to remind everyone that there are lots of different types of wage earners ...continue reading "Yet more raw data: 2021 income bonanza"

Where have I been all day? Well, I woke up a little late and found nothing interesting in the news. The queen is still lying in state. The Russian army is still inexplicably incompetent. The FBI is still issuing subpoenas to the 1/6 rioters. Railroad owners are still threatening to shut down the entire country's ...continue reading "Raw data and lots of it: Inflation trends in various categories of goods and services"

The French have always been a philosophical people.

This is an aerial view of the Rampion wind farm about ten miles off the coast of Sussex in Great Britain. It generates 400 MW of electricity.

Most of the time, the "headline" CPI is reported as the rise in prices over the past year. For example, one year ago the CPI stood at 273.1; today the BLS reported that in August 2022 it was at 295.6. That's an increase of 8.2%. But prices have been flat for the past two months. ...continue reading "Here’s how best to look at inflation"

We got more than just inflation figures today! The Census Bureau has released the 2021 estimates of annual earnings. Here it is for individuals: Men's earnings were up $1,200 last year. Women's earnings were up $150. However, no one has made up for last year's dip. Men's earnings are 2.2% below their 2019 level; women's ...continue reading "Annual incomes were up last year"

The BLS announced the CPI for August today, and the month-over-month figure was nearly as low as it was last month: On a year-over-year basis, headline inflation came in at 8.2%, down from 8.5% in July. As always, the trendline is the thing to watch. The trend for headline inflation continues to come down nicely, ...continue reading "Inflation in August remained subdued"

You may have seen the alarming news today that household net worth dropped $8.7 trillion in the second quarter, a "record" annualized rate of -20.9%. That's all true, but you might be interested to know that this decline was almost entirely due to the stock market, with a little bit added from inflation. Here is ...continue reading "Raw data: Household net worth"

This is a gray hairstreak butterfly in our front garden. We don't see these very often, and I'm not quite sure what attracted this one. In any case, he only stayed a day or two and then fluttered away.

Today in the New York Times, Pamela Paul introduces us to Bo Seo, a two-time world debate champion. He thinks we have a problem: “We disagree badly: Our arguments are painful and useless.” We spend more time vilifying, undermining and nullifying those we disagree with than opening or changing their minds. If more people took ...continue reading "The world is not a debating club"

Via the New York Times, here's a chart from Child Trends that shows how much the social safety net has reduced child poverty over the past 35 years: Before 1986 the social safety net was almost nonexistent for children. Altogether, it reduced child poverty by only 1%. In 1986, Ronald Reagan's Tax Reform Act increased ...continue reading "Raw data: Child poverty, 1986-2019"

I never know how seriously to take these things, but for what it's worth here are how the ten biggest countries in the world fared on the latest Economic Freedom ratings from the Fraser Institute: Here are the 25 biggest countries: Thanks to the pandemic everybody's scores took a bit of a hit in 2020. ...continue reading "Here are the freest big countries in the world"