Kevin Drum 🕸

Many people have come up to me recently and said, "Mr. Drum, sir, was Trump's news conference yesterday really a news conference?" Sorry. It just amuses me that when people describe a Trump speech they now say things like "he told a few sir stories and then...." But let's return to that news conference on ...continue reading "About that Trump “news conference”"

Kamala Harris announced her new Trump-killing populist economic plan today: Harris’s most surprising policy announcement was her plan to ban “price gouging” in grocery and food prices. While details were sparse, the measure would include authorizing the Federal Trade Commission to impose large fines on grocery stores that impose “excessive” price hikes on customers, her ...continue reading "Are grocery stores gouging us?"

This is Charlie peeking out from behind the drapes while Hilbert waves a tail in his face. Eventually Charlie couldn't control himself any longer and walked outside to give Hilbert a swat. Between these two, however, a "swat" is just the barest contact of paw to head. It's possible Hilbert never even felt it.

Border crossings plummeted below 100,000 in July, the first time this has happened since 2020: Out of this total, 56,000 were caught trying to cross the border illegally. The rest were asylum seekers who presented themselves at border stations. It's maybe worth noting that this decline is due to President Biden's new policy of immediately ...continue reading "Illegal border crossings plummet in July"

I'm beating a dead horse on this topic, but here is inflation in the US over the past three years: In 2022 the Fed began raising interest rates. By June, rates went above 1% for the first time. In July monthly inflation abruptly fell off the map and then stayed steady around 3% for the ...continue reading "The Fed played no role in our recent bout of inflation"

Donald Trump says he want to eliminate income taxes on Social Security benefits. These taxes are currently deposited in the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, a policy that was put in place under Ronald Reagan in order to help Medicare and Social Security finances. So what happens to Social Security and Medicare if this ...continue reading "Raw data: How Social Security finances are affected by ending the tax on benefits"

I see that Donald Trump is still droning on about Kamala Harris's Time cover. It's fake, maybe, or it looks like Melania or Time is in the tank for Kamala or something. Just in case you're wondering what this is all about, here's the Time cover and the Getty photograph it's based on: It's an ...continue reading "Kamala Harris looks like Kamala Harris"

Here's the latest from Vox: The hidden reason why your power bill is so high The price of electricity is continuing to rise across the United States, and there’s no end in sight. Why are our electricity bills getting so expensive? Energy prices have been creeping up across the nation for over a decade. The ...continue reading "Today’s boring but true headline: The cost of electricity has not been going up"

So far the Trump team has proposed: No tax on tips. No tax on Social Security. Extend the 2017 corporate tax cut. Implement a $5,000 Child Tax Credit. This would collectively blow the deficit to hell, raising it by something like $1 trillion per year. Does anyone care? Maybe. It makes me wonder if Kamala ...continue reading "Does anyone care about the deficit?"

Several weeks ago a handful of big-name news outlets began receiving a trove of documents about J.D. Vance from "Robert," all of which had been hacked from the Trump campaign. So far, though, nobody has published any of it—even though when the same thing happened in 2016 to Hillary Clinton, they eagerly splashed the hacked ...continue reading "Why is everyone keeping mum about that hacked J.D. Vance material?"

Behold the following timeline: November 21, 2023: Twitter, owned by Elon Musk, sues Media Matters for saying mean things about him. Nine months pass . . . August 9, 2024: NPR reports that the judge in the case, Reed O'Connor, holds stock in Tesla, which is also owned by Musk. Today: O'Connor recuses himself from ...continue reading "Musk judge recuses himself . . . but only from one case"

When I was out in the desert last week letting my telescope image the Lagoon Nebula, I spent my downtime trying yet again to take a better picture of the Milky Way. The basic problem is simple. Since my camera is on a fixed tripod, the longest exposure I can take is about 15 seconds ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

A decade ago California passed Prop 47, which converted certain nonviolent property crimes into misdemeanors and reduced sentences a bit. But did it go too far? This year, Prop 36 is on the November ballot to reverse some of the changes. The motivation, of course, is a rise in crime. But has crime actually gone ...continue reading "Did California go too far when it loosened punishment of property crime?"

The Producer Price Index, a measure of wholesale inflation, rose a bit through the beginning of the year but fell sharply in July, from 2.7% to 2.3%: Average PPI over the past year has been 1.8%. This is more evidence, as if more were needed, that inflation is sufficiently under control. There's no need to ...continue reading "Wholesale inflation drops in July"

In honor of the end of the Paris Olympics, here's one of my last remaining pictures from our trip to Paris a couple of years ago. This is the Palais de Justice taken from the Seine. You can't see it in the photo, but it was pretty busy this day, with gendarmes blocking off entrances ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Here's the lead of a Wall Street Journal article about hourly workers: In the bowels of Boston Logan International Airport, a sign on the door of ABM Industries recently warned would-be job seekers: “WE ARE CURRENTLY NOT HIRING,” it said. “PLEASE KEEP CHECKING.” This was their premier example of an alleged slowdown in the hiring ...continue reading "How are hourly workers doing?"

The Wall Street Journal is inexplicable. Take a look at this headline/chart combo from today's paper: The chart is clear as day: Boomers in the Reagan era were stuck well into "unaffordable" territory for more than six years. Millennials, by contrast, spent 15 years with wonderful, super-affordable housing and since then have been barely in ...continue reading "Housing today is expensive, but not by a lot"

J.D. Vance says he thinks we ought to have a bigger Child Tax Credit. Kamala Harris says we should eliminate the tax on tips. Huh. What's next? Vance saying we need more illegal immigrants to get the birth rate up and Harris saying we need both a Bitcoin and an Ethereum strategic reserve? Meanwhile, Donald ...continue reading "Everything is crazy"

I get three or four fundraising emails every day from the Kamala Harris campaign. That strikes me as fairly normal these days. But before Joe Biden dropped out and she entered the race, I got zero emails per day. Can anyone explain this? Obviously I was on the email lists, but the Biden team never ...continue reading "Biden vs. Harris"

Big news today! Revenue at Donald Trump's social media company was up $70,000 in the second quarter: If this growth trend keeps up, Trump Media might have quarterly revenue of $920,000 by the end of the year. That's almost a million dollars! They also reported a profit of -$16 million. They reported nearly $20 million ...continue reading "Trump Media almost has revenue of $1 million"