Kevin Drum 🕸

This chart comes from Scott Hechinger, who got it from Bloomberg: The rate of shootings has actually gone down a bit over the past year, but when Eric Adams took over as mayor (in January) media coverage of shootings suddenly skyrocketed. So now everyone is scared about their safety even though there's little reason to ...continue reading "The crime surge in New York City is beyond belief. Literally."

I started laughing about halfway through today's Washington Post story about the deletion of Secret Service text messages from the days surrounding the 1/6 insurrection. It took that long to fully appreciate the thesaurus woo of reporters Drew Harwell, Will Oremus and Joseph Menn. Here's a list of the words and phrases they use to ...continue reading "What’s the best word to describe the Secret Service’s loss of text messages?"

Here is Hilbert sprawled across the newspaper this morning as Marian is attempting to solve her puzzles. In the background, Charlie is waiting for a chance to pounce.

We all have our favorites, and Obamacare is one of mine. So I was very happy to see that, against all odds, the latest version of the Democratic spending bill¹ includes a three-year extension of the expanded ACA subsidies originally introduced last year in the American Rescue Plan. These subsidies ensure that no one has ...continue reading "Obamacare gets a boost in the Inflation Reduction Act"

For chrissake: Neither worker pay nor benefits grew at anything close to a record pace last quarter unless you insist on never adjusting anything for inflation. Here's what total compensation for workers looks like over the past two years: Since the beginning of 2021, ECI has risen 6% while inflation has gone up 11%. Employers ...continue reading "Worker pay and benefits are falling"

Uh oh: As usual, monthly changes are volatile and no single month should be taken as definitive of long-term inflation trends. Still, this isn't good news. I'm not sure what suddenly happened in June, but the core inflation rate nearly doubled compared to May. In addition, disposable income dropped 3.6% on an annualized basis, while ...continue reading "Inflation is up and income is down. Ugh."

I'm not a big fan of formal French gardens, but if you're going to see one I suppose Versailles is the pinnacle of the art. When we were there the famous fountains weren't running because they only operate them on weekends. I don't get that. Sure, back in the day they were an engineering marvel, ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

It looks like the Atlanta Fed's forecasting prowess was pretty good for second quarter GDP: Real GDP declined 0.9% on an annualized basis, so we now have two consecutive quarters of contraction. On the bright side, real GDP was up 1.6% compared to a year earlier. Down in the details, none of this can be ...continue reading "GDP shrinks 0.9% in the second quarter"

So how is Russia doing these days? Tyler Cowen points us to a paper from the Yale School of Management that says the Russian economy is in terrible shape: Our team of experts, using private Russian language and unconventional data sources including high frequency consumer data, cross-channel checks, releases from Russia’s international trade partners, and ...continue reading "How long can the Russian economy hold out amid crippling sanctions?"

Interesting times: The Senate has passed the $280 billion chips bill and the House will soon follow. Keep in mind that it's actually about $80 billion for chips and $200 billion to fund 20 "regional technology hubs" for general research into artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing and other cool-sounding futuristic stuff. Also keep in mind ...continue reading "Stuff is getting done. Is it the start of a trend?"

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?"