Kevin Drum 🕸

The American economy gained 261,000 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 171,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate increased to 3.7%. This is a respectable report, but the bad news is that about 300,000 people left employment and ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Net new jobs in October"

In the LA Times today, Anita Chabria reports that Gov. Gavin Newsom is sick and tired of California's lack of progress on homelessness: On Thursday, Newsom hopes to shake up both our dissatisfaction and the status quo by rejecting every local homeless action plan in the state, demanding more intensity when it comes to getting ...continue reading "Gavin Newsom wants action on homelessness, but he needs help"

This is from an op-ed piece at Fox News a couple of weeks ago: Recent crime numbers support the notion that the city is becoming less hospitable. New York crime, at this writing, is up 33% overall. But significantly, there’s been a 36% jump in robberies and a 16% jump in felony assaults. These are ...continue reading "Crime is up in New York City, but how much?"

Remember that patch of Dame's Rocket blowing in the wind that I showed you a couple of months ago? Here it is again, but in a normal photograph that shows what it actually looks like. It's a pretty little flower when you get close up.

A couple of days ago I posted this chart showing that corporations were paying their workers less but marking up their products far, far beyond the rate of inflation: But Matt Yglesias says there's nothing either wrong or unusual about this: Excess demand and profit-seeking by greedy corporations are not competing explanations for inflation — ...continue reading "Corporate markups, take 2"

I have a big pile of charts to show you. Don't worry, though, they'll go pretty quickly. The first is the M2 money supply. It spiked upward after the $3.2 trillion COVID rescue bill was passed in March 2020, and then continued growing. But in January it peaked and has been falling ever since: Next ...continue reading "Inflation will soon be under control, and it has nothing to do with the Fed"

Twelve years ago I wrote a screed about how banks charge high swipe fees on credit cards and then rebate a part of those fees to their richest customers: This is fundamentally my problem with overdraft and interchange fees: they’re surreptitious ways for the poor to subsidize the rich. There’s no law against that, of ...continue reading "We have quantified the madness of reward cards"

I hate to pick on my old friends at Mother Jones, but Abigail Weinberg recently posted a story about right-turn-on-red (RTOR), a longtime staple of California roads that expanded to most of the country 50 years ago. It's received wisdom on the left these days that roads are for bicycles, not cars, so naturally the ...continue reading "“Right Turn on Red” is California’s gift to the nation"

This is from the Rodin Museum. It's the guy who inspired John Travolta's dance moves in Pulp Fiction.

Just for the record, I don't care about either Elon Musk or Twitter. Both fall into the category of "obviously flawed but not as bad as the haters claim." Nor do I care who has a blue checkmark or how much it costs. I also don't care what kind of moderation regime Musk sets up, ...continue reading "Please stop obsessing about Elon Musk"

Here's a familiar headline from the Washington Post: New class of combative MAGA candidates poised to roil House GOP This happens every decade or so. In 1980 it was the Reaganauts. In 1994 it was Newt's New Model Army. In 2010 it was the tea party. This year it's MAGA. It's the same story over ...continue reading "It’s Groundhog Day in Washington DC"

One of my favorite statistics has finally been released for Q3: median asking rent. This is a survey figure from the Census Bureau, and unlike the figures they use for inflation this one is (a) timely and (b) accurate since it includes only asking prices for new rentals. So it gives us a genuinely good ...continue reading "The rental market has cooled down to almost normal"

I came across an old Bloomberg story today that points out something interesting: A measure of US profit margins has reached its widest since 1950, suggesting that the prices charged by businesses are outpacing their increased costs for production and labor. After-tax profits as a share of gross value added for non-financial corporations.... Wait a ...continue reading "Corporations are marking up their products way beyond the inflation rate"

This is someone waiting at the bright yellow doors in Les Andelys—which always looks like "Los Angeles" to me. I don't even know what these doors lead to. A school? I don't recall ever seeing a sign. POSTSCRIPT: And what was yesterday's photo? A lot of you got close, but the answer is: a pair ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Well, this is interesting. Here are two different big investigative stories about the government's efforts to fight online lies: Truth Cops: Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation and How the Biden Administration Caved to Republicans on Fighting Election Disinformation The first is by Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang of The Intercept. The second ...continue reading "The feds are fighting election disinformation, and that’s fine"

The Wall Street Journal is worried that high savings levels might sustain inflation for a long time. Let's take a look: The red line shows the trend of savings levels. There are three spikes that coincide with three different stimulus packages, and during those spikes savings are above the trendline. This means families are saving ...continue reading "Raw data: Savings are high, but spending is normal"

Excellent news for our nation's MAGAnauts: JUST IN: Chief Justice Roberts grants Trump temporary stay on release of tax records to congressional committee. Asks for response from committee by Thursday — Robert Barnes (@scotusreporter) November 1, 2022 Our newly conservative justice system has played its role perfectly. They don't need to rule in favor of ...continue reading "Trump’s tax records delayed yet again"

The Washington Post is worried that we're all getting lazy: In the first half of 2022, productivity — the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an hour — plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor ...continue reading "Are American workers suddenly getting lazy?"

I didn't get around to this last night, and by now most of you are probably already aware of the reaction by all too many Republicans to the attack on Paul Pelosi. In a word, it's been vile. If Republicans were just trying to claim that the attacker didn't have any kind of partisan motivation, ...continue reading "The MAGA right takes repulsive behavior to whole new levels over Paul Pelosi"

Happy Halloween! Can you figure out what this is? The first person to correctly identify it will win the eternal admiration of both their peers and other assorted readers of this blog.