Kevin Drum 🕸

Mexico says they'll retaliate if Donald Trump levies a 25% tariff on everything we buy from them. But retaliate how? What do they buy from us? In fact, they buy about $300 billion worth of goods from us every year. Here are the US industries that would be hurt the most if Mexico levied broad ...continue reading "Raw data: US exports to Mexico"

A reader has suggested that fare evasion is a good measure of the low-level disorder I wrote about yesterday. Maybe! And in New York City it's way up: I'm of three minds on this. On the one hand, it's obviously a symptom of low-level lawbreaking, and it's not really pandemic related. Fare evasion did spike ...continue reading "Civic disorder follow-up: The case of fare evasion"

A few weeks ago I showed you a pair of pictures of the rose window at the Votivkirche in Vienna. Here's the church itself, spectacularly lit up at night.

Tyler Cowen points me to this today: 23.4 million government employees! That's some context. But here's some better context: Kalshi's number includes state and local workers, most of them teachers. The number of federal workers, which is all Musk cares about, comes to 3 million. Just a slight difference. In any case, the 60,000 bet ...continue reading "How many federal workers will Elon Musk fire?"

Semafor reports that the Chinese government is unhappy with their investment in Twitter: State outlets, which put considerable resources into amassing millions of followers on Elon Musk’s social media platform — including by buying ads, deploying bots, and hiring influencers — have recently seen their growth plateau. The growing popularity of Bluesky, which has a ...continue reading "Chinese state losing hard-won influence on Twitter"

Average home prices were up last month, and suddenly nobody wants one anymore: That's a drop of 128,000 homes from the previous month. It's the fifth biggest decline in history.

Matt Yglesias says today that although serious crime is down, "a lot of lower-level disorder that spiked alongside shootings in 2020 never went back to normal." Unlike in some areas where I think the Biden administration made clear policy errors, I don’t know that they did anything wrong about this national epidemic of low-level disorder. ...continue reading "Here’s a shallow dive into public disorder"

Boris Epshteyn is in big trouble: A top adviser to President-elect Donald Trump asked potential administration nominees to give him monthly consulting fees in exchange for advocating for them to Trump, a written review by Trump’s legal team concluded.... It found that among those whom Epshteyn had unsuccessfully solicited for payment was Scott Bessent, Trump’s ...continue reading "Top Trump advisor tried to shake down cabinet hopefuls"

This is the Iron Mountain Chapel, about 50 miles east of Twentynine Palms off Highway 62. It was built back when Gen. George Patton was training tank troops at the Desert Training Center he founded in California during World War II. There were actually two chapels at Camp Iron Mountain, one Catholic and one Protestant. ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Yesterday I posted a brief item noting that the CDC never recommended that schools be closed during COVID. In fact, by July 2020, shortly before the new school year was about to start, they were strongly recommending that schools open in the fall. So why did so many schools close? The answer is that the ...continue reading "If the CDC didn’t close schools during COVID, who did?"

Here are the states with the most progressive and most regressive tax systems: In Minnesota the rich pay 70% more than the poor. In Florida the rich pay 79% less than the poor. It will come as no surprise that every one of the progressive tax states voted for Kamala Harris and nearly all of ...continue reading "In nearly every state, the poor pay a higher tax rate than the rich"

In a word, no. Even at the very beginning of the pandemic, the CDC said only that schools might want to close depending on local transmission rates and known outbreaks—but even then said there was little evidence it helped more generally. After that they became positively evangelistic in their recommendations for schools to stay open ...continue reading "Did the CDC recommend school closures?"

The top chart shows total public K-12 spending as a percent of GDP. The bottom chart is the same for per-pupil spending. For this one I used the share per billion dollars of GDP to avoid a big mess of decimal places.

Here's an interesting thing. It starts with a typical outraged Twitter post: Now suck in your gut and read this very long—but fascinating!—reply from Greg Koenig about why bolts like this cost so much and are worth every penny: Fun fact. In the outskirts of Portland is a nice little shop in an anonymous industrial ...continue reading "The case of the Pentagon’s $45 bolt"

I have a post all teed up about Why Kamala Lost, but I can't quite pull the trigger on publishing it. Here's why: This is not the Democratic (popular vote) winning margin each year. It's the change from the previous election. For example, Joe Biden won by 4.5% in 2020 and Kamala Harris lost by ...continue reading "Why Kamala lost: A confession"

Ezra Klein has a long interview today about governance with Steve Teles and Jennifer Pahlka. The gist is that our government bureaucracies really are terrible and liberals are in denial about the need for massive reform. It left me with many thoughts because I think, overall, it hit the wrong targets. It's hard to adopt ...continue reading "A (sort of) defense of bureaucracy"

The New York Times reports today that the CDC reports that drug overdose deaths have plummeted recently. Sure enough, they have: The Times article provides a bevy of possible reasons for the decline, but I have my own theory. One of the most consistent findings of drug research is that drug use is faddish. In ...continue reading "Raw data: Fentanyl overdoses have dropped dramatically"

How do people feel financially? Do they feel worse than headline indicators like unemployment, inflation, and growth suggest they should? This is all but impossible to answer. If you look at personal finance figures, you'll see that people are earning more than they used to and also spending more. But how do they feel after ...continue reading "Our economic quandary: Should we pay more attention to vibes or data?"

Oh come on. Donald Trump finally nominated a Black guy for his cabinet, and just like last time it's for Housing and Urban Development. This would be no big deal for a president who nominated other Black cabinet members too. But your only one? Once could be a coincidence. Twice, not so much. The question ...continue reading "Yet another Black guy is running HUD for Trump"

The revenge president is at it again. But the weird part of this story is that there's no real revenge to be had: The US general who was photographed as the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan is seeing a promotion blocked by a sole Republican senator, multiple outlets reported. ....The senator reportedly placing a ...continue reading "Trump blocks promotion of Afghanistan general"