Kevin Drum 🕸

This is a picture of Highway 177 looking north on a day with 120° temperatures. It may be only the edge of the Mojave Desert, but it's still pretty hot.

I see that Kamala Harris now has an extensive issues page on her website. People have been whining about its absence forever, and now that it's here I predict that about 17 people will bother reading it. My favorite is this one: Politically, I'm sure this is a winner. Logically, not so much. It is, ...continue reading "We need higher energy costs"

Bruce Springsteen's wife, Patti Scialfa, has joined the multiple myeloma brigade that includes me, Tom Brokaw, Steve Scalise, Karen Tumulty, and maybe even Queen Elizabeth II. I wish her the best of luck.

Semafor published a story this evening about a mysterious right wing financier who organized a secret¹ group of conservative influencers to smear Kamala Harris with sexual innuendo: This influencer network was organized over emails and Zoom calls....The money was good: One participant made more than $20,000 for several weeks of boosting assigned messages, according to ...continue reading "Now we know where the sex smears against Kamala Harris came from"

What's the single best metric for the health of an economy? Conventionally it's GDP growth, and there's nothing really wrong with that. But if I had to choose one thing it would be median income. In particular, market income before taxes or government benefits. Here it is: Compared to GDP, income is a better measure ...continue reading "Median income is the best measure of an economy"

Government bureaucrats say the unemployment rate last month was 4.2%. Donald Trump says the real unemployment rate was 7.9%. Please. In August the United States had 161 million workers out of a total population of 337 million. That's an unemployment rate of 52.1%. Why won't the lamestream media tell you that more than half of ...continue reading "Half of all Americans are out of work"

What do you make of this? If you start at 2009, suicidal thoughts reported among teens have gone up by more than half. But if you look at the entire data series, suicidal thoughts declined by half during the '90s and aughts and have now merely reverted to their historical average. It's all especially hard ...continue reading "Raw data: Suicide and thoughts of suicide among teens"

This data comes straight from the CDC: Nuff said. This is a crisis, people.

A couple of days ago I mentioned that the share of foreign born workers in the US had accelerated a bit over the past two years. This was largely because the number of native born workers had flattened out, and I wasn't sure if this was due to native workers being pushed out of the ...continue reading "Raw data: Labor participation for prime age, native born workers"

I was looking for some old photographs last night and ran across my pictures of Hilbert when we first brought him home ten years and two cameras ago. So today you get a stroll down memory lane. Hilbert isn't quite a kitten in these pictures—he was ten months old when we adopted him—but he still ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 6 September 2024"

Over at National Review, Dominic Pino has a sarcastic post about Democratic efforts to collect unpaid taxes from rich people by amping up IRS enforcement. I don't care much about the fact that some of the estimates for revenue collection were a little crazy, but even putting that aside Pino has a point. Using the ...continue reading "Treasury is way behind on auditing the wealthy"

As you all know by now, a couple of days ago the Justice Department indicted a pair of Russian nationals who work for the propaganda outlet RT. They are charged with secretly bankrolling Tenet Media, a startup content farm that churned out right-wing videos. But why? Unlike Russian efforts to seed social media with low-quality ...continue reading "Russia has been targeting the American right all along"

The American economy gained 142,000 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 52,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate ticked down to 4.2%. Employment numbers for the previous two months were revised downward, so we've now had three consecutive ...continue reading "Job growth remains low in August but earnings soar"

Vox points me today to a new paper suggesting the following sequence of events: In 2006, a fungal disease called white nose syndrome starts killing off bats. Bats fail to eat insects. Farmers have to use more pesticide. Pesticides kill babies. Infant mortality goes up. Here's the inevitable chart: The researcher, Eyal Frank, found that ...continue reading "Unintended consequence of the day: Bats and infant mortality"

Just for fun, I want to show you what would happen if, against all odds, Donald Trump enacted a 20% tariff on all imports and it had no effect on the volume of imports. Here it is: For example, in 2023 the federal government had a budget deficit of $1.8 trillion. Total imports—every car, every ...continue reading "Trump and his tariffs"

OK, I admit that this is pretty amusing: Q: What specific legislation will you commit to to make child care affordable? Trump: Well, I would do that and we're sitting down, you know, I was, somebody, we had Marco Rubio and my daughter, Ivanka… But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers ...continue reading "Donald Trump and the child care non-crisis"

This is a masked lapwing at the LA Zoo.

The BLS reported revised Q2 productivity today, and while I was fiddling around with it I came across a question I couldn't answer: how are we doing in the post-pandemic era? Here are your two choices: If we assume linear growth before the pandemic, we're doing well. If we assume exponential growth, we're behind the ...continue reading "How is productivity doing?"

I see that AH Datalytics has published the inaugural version of their Real-Time Crime Index, which provides rough estimates of crime within a couple of months of it happening. This contrasts with the FBI, which takes about six months to provide quarterly estimates and nearly a year to provide final annual figures. What's more, the ...continue reading "Why did murder spike in the summer of 2020?"

This is the Belvedere Museum in Vienna. It was originally built as a palace, of course, but it never got used much. There were just too many other palaces in Vienna. Eventually, after 50 years of sporadic use, Maria Therese transferred the Imperial Picture Gallery to the Belvedere and it's been an art museum ever ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"