Kevin Drum 🕸

Be careful with these micro-summaries that are ubiquitous on Twitter: Welker: Do you acknowledge that consumers will ultimately pay more if there are more tariffs. Do you acknowledge that? Vance: No, I don’t. Economists disagree about the effects of tariffs.. pic.twitter.com/iORjF3nP1W — Acyn (@Acyn) August 25, 2024 In fact, Vance explicitly agreed that tariffs can ...continue reading "What J.D. Vance really said about tariffs"

This is maybe not the smoothest translation ever, but apparently Israel has launched a massive preemptive attack on Hezbollah along Lebanon's southern border: Presumably the planned Hezbollah operation was the long-awaited Iranian retribution for Israel's recent assassinations. Hezbollah has well over 100,000 rockets in its arsenal, so this could end up as a very long, ...continue reading "Israel launches preemptive attack on Hezbollah"

Let us investigate the vast history of lying by Gov. Tim Walz as alleged by the Trump campaign: Retired from the National Guard as a command sergeant major. He did rise to the rank of command sergeant major, but upon retirement his rank reverted to master sergeant. Had children via IVF. Walz almost always refers ...continue reading "Is Tim Walz a big fat liar?"

Here's something I never expected to see: Katy Y.Y. Tam, a postdoctoral psychology researcher and boredom expert.... Huh. And ironically, I imagine that studying boredom is pretty fascinating. Anyway, this is from a story about mindless switching between TikTok videos. Tam says this is an attempt to relieve boredom that backfires: the more you do ...continue reading "Boredom on the internet"

How do wars end? Lots of different ways. One of the most common is also the simplest: the losing side surrenders and sues for terms. Needless to say, these terms are often harsh. Wars can also end via negotiated settlements, usually mediated by a third party. In these cases the losing side often avoids the ...continue reading "Here’s how war in the Middle East ends"

This is apropos of nothing in particular. It's mainly just for reference: When tech companies hire people, they're hiring from the pool of STEM college graduates. So, for example, if you read that some Silicon Valley company is 20% Asian, you shouldn't compare that to Asians' 6% share of the population. You should compare it ...continue reading "Raw data: STEM degrees by race"

Every month the BLS publishes employment figures. These numbers are calculated from a survey and then adjusted based on estimated births and deaths of business enterprises. That's a little iffy, so every year the figures are re-calibrated based on state unemployment data, which is more accurate. Here's what the revisions have looked like over the ...continue reading "Bloomberg compares Republicans and Democrats"

I haven't written much about the lead-crime link lately because there hasn't been much to write about. Today there is. Beware: a righteous rant is coming. Many years ago Steven Levitt and John Donohue—Levitt is one half of the Freakonomics duo—postulated that the crime decline of the '90s was due to Roe v. Wade. "Children ...continue reading "Legalized abortion has nothing to do with crime rates"

Welp, here's something you probably didn't expect Donald Trump to say: He's lying, of course, but that's not the point. The point is that abortion bans have proven to be such a disaster for conservatives that Trump now feels the need to effectively abandon his opposition to abortion altogether. Conservative Philip Klein calls it what ...continue reading "Trump abandons the pro-lifers"

Hilbert was really into our picture taking session yesterday.

The Washington Post has news: Good. This is yet another reason to vote against Trump, as if you needed one. (I wonder what RFK Jr. got in return for his endorsement? You know there has to be something.)

New home sales increased by 71,000 in July, bringing the total number to an annualized rate of 739,000. Adjusted for population, this is 2.19 new houses sold per thousand people: This looks pretty healthy: we're holding steady at the level from just before the pandemic. But if you zoom out and take a longer view, ...continue reading "We should be buying a million new homes per year"

Over at National Review, Charles Cooke says Kamala Harris's convention speech was fine but didn't really say anything about what she wants to accomplish as president: Harris’s Speech Advanced Harris — and Nothing Else Besides I agree wholeheartedly with the commentators who have suggested that the address was “unthreatening” for swing voters or undecideds. The ...continue reading "Beating Trump isn’t everything, it’s the only thing"

One of the things I liked about Kamala Harris's convention speech was her explicit plea at the end to reject Donald Trump's apocalyptic view of American decline: You know, our opponents in this race are out there every day denigrating America, talking about how terrible everything is. Well, my mother had another lesson she used ...continue reading "America is not in decline. Not even close."

Here is Donald Trump in North Carolina yesterday: Remember when Biden sent Kamala to Europe to stop the war in Ukraine. She met with Putin, and then three days later, he attacked.... She met with Putin to tell him, "Don’t do it." And three days later, he attacked. Once again, we have a head scratcher. ...continue reading "Donald Trump is (still) losing his mind"

NIMBY means Not In My Backyard. In other words, build stuff all you want as long as you don't do it near me, where it will bring traffic and crowds in its wake. It's a powerful force, but over the past couple of decades a counterforce has been steadily growing that blames NIMBY for slow ...continue reading "Is YIMBY really becoming a political force?"

When I go out to the desert for a bit of astrophotography, I never take pictures of the moon. This is because I deliberately go out on moonless nights. However, I happen to have the telescope set up in my backyard at the moment because I wanted to test out a few things, so last ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

I'll admit that the nonstop pronouncements of joy at the DNC kind of set my teeth on edge, but regardless of the word itself it sure does highlight an aspect of the Trump campaign that never got much attention before: it's relentlessly dour, angry, and driven by grievance. It's almost like we had all forgotten ...continue reading "I’m in favor of ordinary this year"

Here's the latest YouGov breakdown of the presidential race: Kamala Harris started out three points behind Trump and is now three points ahead. I should note that I routinely show the YouGov poll for a couple of reasons. The first is that it's a pretty good poll: reliable, weekly, and with good crosstabs. The second ...continue reading "Harris is now three points ahead"

There are several reports out today about Kamala Harris's stand on taxes, though I'm not quite sure why. They're apparently based on vague statements from the campaign that Harris supports Joe Biden's tax proposals from several months ago, but there have been no firm details about this. Nonetheless, two of Biden's proposals have been making ...continue reading "Kamala Harris’s kinda sorta tax plans"