Kevin Drum 🕸

Are Republicans bound and determined to make Donald Trump's dream come true of routinely stealing elections they've lost? It sure looks that way. Are they the only ones who think think that elections are rigged by their opponents? Um... The trend here is so obvious that I hardly need to point it out. When Bush ...continue reading "About a third of everyone doesn’t trust elections"

The Los Angeles Times reports today on the strange tale of methotrexate: Methotrexate is a cheap, common drug prescribed to millions of Americans.... Many have rheumatic illnesses. Others take it to treat inflammatory bowel disease, psoriasis or cancer.... In low doses, it has proved to be one of the safest, least expensive and most effective ...continue reading "Methotrexate is now a victim of the Supreme Court"

Caleb Williams is USC's quarterback of the future. But when he was still in high school, his father was already thinking about the imminent arrival of an endorsement-fueled college game: So Carl and his business partners, who together own a D.C. area gym, sketched out their own plans with Caleb’s help while he was still ...continue reading "Today’s college quarterbacks need mission statements"

It's been a month or two since I've done this, so here, once again, is a chart showing the average monthly mortgage payment for houses sold in the US. This time I'm showing it as a percentage of income: As you can see, mortgage payments for newly purchased houses were pretty steady from the end ...continue reading "Raw data: The cost of buying a house"

I feel like writing a big ol' post about my latest adventures with night sky photography. This will be of interest to only a few, so don't say you weren't warned. June is a good month for photographing the Milky Way, so after we got back from Paris I decided to give this another go ...continue reading "A weekend soliloquy about night sky photography"

As we all know by now, the US added 372,000 jobs in June. Is that good? Bad? Neither? Just for fun, I'd like to show you why it's wise not to pay too much attention to any single instance of this number. Background first: The monthly jobs number comes from the payroll survey done by ...continue reading "Did we really add 372,000 jobs last month?"

Wednesday was a momentous day: we let Charlie out into the backyard for the first time. And it went great! Charlie swatted bugs and roamed around the ferns and a good time was had by all. Thursday was . . . not so great. Charlie almost immediately hopped the fence into our neighbor's yard and ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 8 July 2022"

Let me get this straight. In the Pennsylvania Senate race we have one guy who lives in New Jersey running against another guy who had a stroke and hasn't been seen in public since. Am I missing anything here?

An awful lot of people still don't seem to get the fact that you have to adjust wages for inflation to see how people are doing. A 5% wage increase is good if the inflation rate is 2% but bad if the inflation rate is 8%. So here are two charts that show what's been ...continue reading "Wages continue to plummet"

The American economy gained 372,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 282,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate remained flat at 3.6%. This month's report is something of a statistical mirage. The size of the civilian labor force ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Net new jobs in June"

Friday is new jobs day. Here's my prediction: If new jobs are higher than expected, it's an indication that the economy is running too hot. This is producing a demand-driven inflationary spiral that needs to be stomped on. If new jobs are lower than expected, it's an indication that workers are holding out for higher ...continue reading "My prediction for new jobs"

Buckle up, I've got an exciting post for you today! As you know, Gross Domestic Product is the size of the economy. It's calculated by adding up the value of all the goods and services produced in the United States. But you can calculate the same number by adding up all the income needed to ...continue reading "How big is the US economy, anyway?"

Every week I try to post at least one picture in the categories Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral. I've always wondered if anyone noticed that. I've already done animals and minerals this week, so that leaves vegetables, which are typically either flowers or gardens. So here's a picture of the Coulée Verte in Paris, an old ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Well now, here's a fascinating story. In 2017 Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey because he was pissed off over Comey's investigation of him. A year later Comey was chosen by the IRS as a lucky recipient of the rectal probe version of a tax audit, an audit so intensive and so rare that ...continue reading "Did Donald Trump deploy the IRS in his war against the FBI?"

In comments last night, skeptonomist accused me of rarely being interested in showing income inequality. This cut me to the core, but there's truth to it and it's worth showing you why. The single best set of numbers for income inequality come from the CBO. There are two reasons: (a) they collect a broad set ...continue reading "Income inequality hasn’t grown much since the Great Recession"

This is a surprisingly tricky question, but with a twist at the end. When you talk about earnings you have to account for at least three different things: Mean or median? Mean (aka "average" or "per capita") income is usually not a great measure because the ultra-wealthy skew it. If you have ten people making ...continue reading "Raw data: How much do Americans earn?"

The Fed minutes for their June 14-15 meeting were released today, and they explained why the Fed took such aggressive action on interest rates: “The near-term inflation outlook had deteriorated since the time of the May meeting,” the minutes said. “Participants were concerned that the May CPI release indicated that inflation pressures had yet to ...continue reading "The bulk of the evidence suggests that inflationary pressures are abating"

Every year I spend a few days taking pictures of hummingbirds in our garden. Here is our 2022 hummingbird posing in front of a Rose of Sharon. Such a beautiful little creature.

Over in England, there's been a long-running case involving an international development researcher who was let go for tweeting about transgender women. In particular, she repeatedly expressed skepticism that trans women are really women and the tribunal ruled that this was largely the reason her employment contract wasn't renewed. I had never heard of this ...continue reading "Maya Forstater wins her transgender case. Good."

The New York Times wrote today about a moderate Republican woman who loathed the Dobbs decision removing the constitutional right to abortion: As Gov. Gretchen Whitmer prepared to kick off a round-table discussion about abortion rights at a brewery recently, Alisha Meneely sat at one corner of the table, feeling politically abandoned. “This scares me ...continue reading "How to make friends and influence abortion wafflers"