Kevin Drum 🕸

If we take CPI as our measure and assume that June was the peak for headline inflation, here's how long our current round of inflation lasted: Headline: 15 months (April 2021 to June 2022) Core: 12 months (April 2021 to March 2022) Does 12 months count as transitory? Certainly it's longer than Team Transitory initially ...continue reading "Team transitory vs. Team inflation"

We have broken the back of inflation! OK, not really, but the news is good this month. The headline rate of inflation dropped from 9% to 8.5% while the core rate of inflation stayed steady at 5.9%. Given the underlying state of the economy, which is pretty strong, this probably finally represents that we've passed ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Inflation in July"

Not much to report this month: My M-protein level dropped from 0.75 to 0.74. A bigger decline would be nice, but holding things steady is fine. This won't matter for much longer anyway if I get the call for CAR-T treatment soon, since that will then be responsible for my cancer load and I'll be ...continue reading "Health update"

Your average lazy travel blogger/photographer wouldn't bother to visit La Defense on a trip to Paris. "It's just a puffed-up office park. What's the point?" Or maybe they'd take a telephoto image from around the Arc de Triomphe and call it a day. But not me. Admittedly, I didn't go until our very last day, ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Republicans have gone all in on their gigantic hissy fit over the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. In one sense, of course, this isn't surprising: the hissy fit has been the defining characteristic of the Republican Party ever since Newt Gingrich invented it in the '90s and and Fox News perfected it in the aughts. At ...continue reading "Republican hissy fit over FBI search is based on . . . absolutely nothing"

The BLS released productivity numbers for Q2 this morning, and the headline number is bad: a 4.6% decline from the previous quarter (at an annualized rate). This is bad, but in a slightly different way than it seems. Here's a chart that shows the absolute level of productivity, not the change from quarter to quarter: ...continue reading "A not-so-brief look at productivity and the labor force"

As you know by now, the FBI conducted a search of Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump's Florida home, on Monday morning. For some reason, everyone assumes that they were looking for boxes of documents that Trump should have turned over to the National Archives but instead took with him when he left office. That makes no sense. ...continue reading "The FBI search of Trump’s home probably wasn’t about the 15 boxes"

I'm bored. It's dex night and I can't sleep but I have nothing to do. I'd like to play with my telescope but it's too cloudy even for testing. So how about if we update our gasoline price chart? It annoys conservatives, so it's worth doing: The price of gasoline just keeps going down, down, ...continue reading "Gasoline prices were down yet again last week"

This is a long-tailed Pea-blue butterfly captured in our front yard a few days ago. It is a member of the gossamer winged family, and according to Wikipedia it is common in Europe, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Australia. Notably missing from this list is our entire hemisphere, let alone Southern California. So maybe ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

One of the ways that the new climate change bill¹ raises money to pay for itself is by hiring more IRS agents to audit rich people. This will make up for the massive drop in audits of the rich that's been engineered by Republicans over the past decade. This has conservatives in a panic. Over ...continue reading "The new enforcement budget for the IRS is aimed solely at the rich"

A recently published research paper has been making the rounds that purports to measure the ideological slant of the Big Three cable news channels. The methodology is to (a) identify all guests who have at least ten hours of screen time over the past decade, (b) add up the amount of time they appear each ...continue reading "Was MSNBC a center-right news channel during the Trump years?"

I was puttering around in my local Target yesterday and I noticed something in the clothing department. In the name of diversity and body positivity, both the mannequins and the pictures of smiling models covered the full gamut of body types: thin, fat, big, tall, short, you name it. But that was only in the ...continue reading "Why no body positivity for men?"

And that's a good thing! My doctor tells me that I've been upgraded from non-urgent to urgent on the waiting list for my eagerly anticipated CAR-T treatment. I still don't have a date, but presumably this means I'm inching my way to the top of the list. (This change has nothing to do with the ...continue reading "I am officially urgent"

Rick Nevin writes in with the latest data on juvenile arrests. It's pretty spectacular: I don't know that I agree with Rick's trendlines—I doubt that juvenile crime is going to hit zero anytime soon—but his basic idea is sound. And it's remarkable that even as lead poisoning has flattened out, teen crime rates continue to ...continue reading "Juvenile crime is down yet again"

The Washington Post reports today about MoFi Records, a company that creates analog reissues of famous albums on vinyl. But a few weeks ago a customer discovered that the mastering process they used was not, in fact, completely analog: In a sometimes halting video posted to the YouTube channel of his Phoenix record shop, the ...continue reading "No, you can’t tell the difference between analog and digital"

I had a thought today. I don't know that it matters much, but here it is. You may recall that I wrote a post a few days ago explaining which metrics are used by NBER to date the starting points of recessions. GDP is not one of those metrics for the monthly dating, but it ...continue reading "Has the US economy really been shrinking?"

Oh man, not this again: It was once the most popular boy’s name in France, inspired in part by Hollywood films and boybands. But for the more than 150,000 French Kevins, the name has become so targeted by mockery, comic sketches and class prejudice that a new documentary is hoping to set the record straight ...continue reading "France fights back against Kevin prejudice"

Charlie looks so well balanced in this picture, doesn't he? But in real life he looked as if he was about crash belly first into Hilbert. He didn't, though, and Hilbert just kept on napping.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has agreed to support the latest version of Joe Biden's spending bill, but only if . . . . . . the provision that places limits on the carried interest loophole is removed. All I can do is laugh at this point. The CIL is now officially the cockroach of tax law. ...continue reading "Democrats finally agree on spending bill"

The monthly jobs report has loads of stuff in it, and I like to highlight something different each time. This month, it's average weekly hours worked: Riddle me this: We supposedly have millions of job openings that companies can't fill. That being the case, you'd think that in the meantime they'd be giving their workers ...continue reading "Economic mystery of the month"